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The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too
Rose Schneiderman
[…] ni tampoco para golpear con la frente la tierra,
ni para llenarnos el corazón con agua salada,
sino para caminar conociendo,
para tocar la rectitud con decisiones infinitamente cargadas de sentido.
[…] not to beat the earth with our brows
or to fill our hearts with salt water
But to set forth knowing, to touch rectitude
with decisions infinitely charged with meaning.
Pablo Neruda
Citizen's input to big data: Maria Teresa's view
Maria Teresa is a 57-year-old woman who lives in a low-income neighbourhood in an average-sized town in Southern Europe. As a child, she attended primary school but had to leave early in order to work. She made her living from manual works which she had to quit to raise her kids.
Maria Teresa has never read about the WHO's social determinants of health,1 or heard about ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ by Marmot;2 she would not be able to pronounce Virchow properly, or explain what happened in Silesia.3 She has no idea about what has been going on in the Conferences on Health Promotion over the past three decades. She does not know what the term health assets means or might think Antonovsky4 is a member of that newly arrived immigrant family down the road or an exotic dancer of that famous Russian ballet. However, Maria Teresa could draw an extraordinary picture of the sociodemographic developments of her neighbourhood over the past 40 years; of how unemployment has affected her community; on the different health conditions suffered by women and men; on the effects of drug consumption in the 1980s and how that terrible epidemic took away several dozen lives among the local youths; of how and why more and more women in her neighbourhood take anxiety medication, and about …
Footnotes
Twitter Follow Sonia López-Villar @sonialopezvi
Collaborators Working group ‘Asturias Community Health Guide’ (2016): Marcial Vicente Argüelles Suárez; Nadia María García Alas; Amelia González López; José Antonio González Fernández; José Ramón Hevia Fernández; Marta María Pisano González; José Feliciano Tato Budiño; Belén Álvarez Delgado; Ana Cortés Velarde; Yolanda Cotiello Cueria; Jara Cubillo Llanes; Ana Belén Díaz Fernández; Patricia Escartín Lasierra; Emilio Parajón Posada and Community Health School (A Pie De Barrio); Margarita Fernández Fernández; Olga Fernández Fernández; Adriana Fernández García; Silvia Fernández Rodríguez; Yurema de la Fuente Rodríguez; Daniel García Blanco; Ana Covadonga González Pisano; María Guiomar González Trespando; Dolors Juvinyà Canal; Ana María López Menéndez; Lara Menéndez González; Beatriz Nuin González; Pablo Pérez Solís; Manuel del Rivero Pérez; María Jesús Rodríguez Nachón; Juan Luis Ruiz-Giménez Aguilar; Marta Sastre Paz; Andreu Segura Benedicto; Sociedad de Enfermería de Atención Primaria en Asturias (SEAPA); Marian Uría Urraza; María Isabel Villamil Díaz.
Contributors RC had the original idea for the commentary and wrote the first draft. OS and SL-V revised the paper and completed box, reflections and conclusions.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.