Social Determinants of Health: What Are They and How Do We Screen

Abstract

The Future of Nursing 2020-2030: Charting a Path to Achieve Health Equity report recognizes nurses' impact on the medical and social factors that drive health outcomes (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2021). The report calls for nursing to take bold steps to address individual and structural level social determinants of health (SDoH)-or social and environmental factors contributing to poor health, poor health outcomes, and health disparities (NASEM, 2021, p. 5). Nurses must recognize the significance of SDoH on patient health outcomes in order to advance health equity and employ nursing interventions to affect positive change for our patients. SDoH are part of our patients' stories, and holistic nursing means we know the whole patient story. Although it is now widely recognized that SDoH affect health outcomes, a key challenge for nurses is that they represent an enormous range of factors-from food and housing insecurity to personal safety and environmental exposures-that may be more or less able to change with interventions in clinical settings. Furthermore, concerns have been raised that screening for SDoH-especially when not done with sensitivity, cultural competence, or ready intervention-may compromise therapeutic relationships and marginalize patients (Wallace et al., 2020). However, despite these concerns, healthcare systems are widely adopting SDoH assessments, generally through electronic health record screening questions, and attempting to implement associated workflows and interventions. Given this landscape, the purpose of this article, within this special issue of Orthopaedic Nursing, is to provide an overview of SDoH factors, identify best practices related to screening and referral, and highlight nurse-directed interventions in clinical settings.