EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A social determinants of health survey in an Appalachian East Tennessee Medical Center: Initial findings and correlations with physical and emotional states of health

Paul D Terry, Gulsah Onar, Jennifer Ferris, Robert Eric Heidel, Nate Brophy, Kritika Thapa, Laylan Shali, Heidi Worth, Gayathri Kumar, Tracy Walker and Rajiv Dhand

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 10, 1-13

Abstract: Background: People living in Appalachia experience inequities in health outcomes that may result from social determinants of health (SDH) and consequent barriers to healthcare. Objective: We aimed to assess SDH in our Appalachian patient population and examine associations between SDH and patients’ physical and emotional well-being. Methods: We constructed and administered a SDH questionnaire in an urban medical center in Appalachian East Tennessee. Our survey included administration of the Short Form-36 (SF-36), which measures various domains of physical and emotional health. We used the SDH questionnaire to enumerate respondents’ barriers to health (a total barrier score), with a maximum of 47 barriers identified. Descriptive statistics were calculated as frequencies and percentages. Spearman’s and Pearson’s (r) correlations and hierarchical multiple regression models were used to quantify associations between the SDH barrier scores and SF-36 subscales. Results: Our patients experienced substantial barriers to health (M = 11.61, SD = 5.10). SDH in our population included being underweight or overweight (BMI

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0332087 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 32087&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0332087

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0332087

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-11
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0332087