The Housing Gap: Understanding the Role of Clinicians and Health Systems to Address Determinants of Health

Housing is an essential determinant of health. Neighborhood characteristics, housing conditions and quality, housing stability, and housing affordability are identified pathways linking housing to health outcomes. While historically overlooked by healthcare researchers and organizations, many anchor institutions have recently taken an approach to mitigating the risk associated with poor and/or unstable housing. Using recommendations by Sir Michael Marmot in The Health Gap: Doctors and the Social Determinants of Health as our framework, this paper highlights the importance of housing on health outcomes and the role of clinicians and health systems to address this determinant. These areas of action initially proposed by Marmot, and re-stated in similar terms by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, call for changes to clinical education around issues like housing, seeing the individual in a broader context, the use of healthcare as employer and anchor in development of affordable housing, investments in community development, and advocacy for policies that increase quality and stability of healthy, affordable housing.