Understanding Policy Influences on Health and Occupation Through the Use of the Life Course Health Development (LCHD) Framework

Life course health development (LCHD) is a framework that considers the transactional nature of risks and protective factors along the life trajectory and how this context influences health. Public policies, from health care to education to social services to labor laws, have many goals, including lessening and eliminating health disparities, yet inequities in health services and outcomes remain. Policy is a contextual factor that may be overlooked when examining influences on health and occupation. As such, the LCHD framework may assist occupational therapy practitioners in understanding the influences of policy—both successes and failures—on occupation. In this article, we introduce the principles of LCHD and use this framework to illustrate analysis of a policy example of paid family leave, demonstrating how gaps in or unintended consequences of policy may contribute to disparities in health and occupation for certain populations.