GPHW2024: What’s Love Got To Do With It? Social love as an approach to public health and violence prevention

Theme: Rethinking Public Health Paradigms

Date and Time: 8th April 2024 | 09:30 – 10:30 (GMT)

Event Description: The term ‘social love’ describes the motivation and actions of a system, organization, or institution (and people working within them), for the collective good, increasing the well-being of another, self, community, and the environment. With a collective affective quality, it involves care, respect, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, and trust, valuing the other, self, community, and environment, and remaining open and receptive.

Public health systems dominated by biomedical models of care often neglect ‘social love’, to the potential detriment of those providing and using public health services. With mounting evidence that human connection and compassion are associated with the delivery of high-quality healthcare, increased health outcomes, and societal well-being, now is the time to recognize the unlocked potential of social love as a concept that could enhance public health discourse, introducing a new way to analyze problems, and deliver interventions. The concept of social love goes beyond traditional concepts of “compassionate care” in taking an asset-based and systems-level approach, focused on rethinking public health narratives, systems, and interventions to elevate protective factors across populations.

We will also consider the role of power and civic engagement in promoting public health and socially loving approaches.

Distributions of power are a key determinant of health; power imbalances in society have detrimental impacts on population health and are a key driver of inequalities. Considering the community-level impacts and solutions to disempowerment and power imbalances can contribute to creating systems and environments that form part of the social love approach.

This webinar will demonstrate the potential value of social love and power as concepts to improve public health practice and decision-making to promote population health and wellbeing, highlighting the positive impact social love could have on addressing key public health issues, such as violence prevention.

Event Link

Event Type: Seminar/Webinar

Event Format: online

Language(s): English

Organiser(s): FPH Emergency Services SIG, FPH Global Violence SIG, and the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association (GLEPHA)

How to Attend Virtually: Zoom Link (will be sent after registration)

Registration: Link