why are you interested in public health essay

why are you interested in public health essay

The Importance of Public Health

1. Introduction

Public health care is most important as it ensures the health of the entire community. The focus of these organizations is not only to cure people who are suffering from diseases and illnesses, but also to prevent such illness from occurring in the first place. Public health is an organized social and political effort. It is aimed at improving, developing, sustaining, and creating conditions that have a positive influence on the health of the entire population. This does not mean that the government and charities do this on their own. Public health care involves many sectors of the workforce, often working in teamwork. These may be people working in public health, or they may be people employed in the private or voluntary sector. This could include health visitors, doctors, teachers, plumbers, refuse collectors, engineers, scientists, and other people such as voluntary workers. This list is certainly not exhaustive. But they may all contribute to public health in different ways.

2. The Impact of Public Health

As we reviewed in the section, out of all the definitions of public health, Sir Donald Acheson’s statement that it is “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society” is the most commonly cited. This is partially due to the fact that it was used in the UK’s first ever public health White Paper in 1987 and it is also the definition used by the Faculty of Public Health. The impact of public health services can be demonstrated in numerous ways and therefore is difficult to measure. It is not just the health and well-being of the population, but could be equated to something like the success of a business or military operation. If the primary objective of an operation is to maximize its effectiveness for the least cost; in order to improve health by preventing disease, creating healthier lifestyles and environments or improving the treatment of illnesses, public health must maximize its resources in the most efficient way. This does not just mean money, but also people (knowledge and skills) and materials. This aim of efficiency coincides with the continuing development in quality of services and focusing public concerns on areas of priority i.e heart disease, cancer etc. The end result is an improvement in the health and well-being of society due to the implementation of evidence-based public health interventions. These are sometimes intended, nor directly health-related for example an environmental and social policy often has health implications. One way of measuring the impact of public health on a nation’s health status is the DALY. This is the disability-adjusted life year, a measurement of the gap between the current health status and an ideal situation where the entire population lives to an advanced age, free of disease and disability. The DALY is the sum of the years of potential life lost due to premature mortality and the years of life lived in less than full health. While it is difficult to put an exact figure on the number of DALYs averted by public health actions because of the scope, varying quality and direct and indirect nature of public health work, on the whole, the most significant improvements in health status of a population have been due to public health interventions. This could be exemplified in the control of infectious diseases from immunization programs to global campaigns to eradicate diseases such as smallpox. Other examples include improvements in the control of food and water safety, health promotion, preventative measures, and healthcare with public health surveillance used to identify health problems and then monitor and evaluate interventions made to solve them.

3. Key Areas of Public Health

There are many definitions of public health, none of which are perfect but all convey the same meaning. Public health is about the prevention of disease and promotion of good health for all the citizens of a society. This is the aim of public health, which is worked towards by improving the health of individuals and of societies. If medicine is about the cure of diseases, public health is about the prevention of illness, the prolongation of life, and the promotion of health and efficiency through organized community effort. The recent White Paper “Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation” has a clear definition of public health as a practical pursuit to prevent ill-health and prolong life amongst the population as a whole. The last sentence of abstract terms can be translated into two key missions or “domains” for public health, which were recently generated by a group of medical educators in America who were responding to a perceived loss of identity and a decline of interest in public health amongst physicians.

Public health is a vast discipline. It concerns itself with the patterns and causes of health throughout societies, but it has become mainly associated with the organization and public provision of prevention and cure of disease. This is to do with more than health care, which is only a part of public health action. Public health is concerned with the totality of health of a population. This is a marked departure from medicine, which has concentrated on the health of individuals. The emphasis on the population is its principal distinguishing feature, and this leads to the necessity to work at some levels beyond or outside the health care system.

4. Challenges in Public Health

When considering the global burden of communicable disease, it is clear that ever new challenges have arisen. The age of emerging infectious disease is far from over, as demonstrated by the advent of new diseases such as SARS and the global spread of old ones such as drug resistant tuberculosis and the current pandemic of swine flu. At the same time, with the near global eradication of smallpox and the increasing regional success of disease eradication and elimination efforts for afflictions such as polio and guinea worm, we are faced with a new challenge of what to do with post eradication public health. An increased emphasis on scientific research and new technology, their potential mishandling, and bioterrorism at the dawn of the new millennium has given rise to new concerns for international public health security. Public health has to adapt to all these new and varied issues while still continuing to combat the old and existing problems of disease, injury, and disability across the world. The challenge here is to be able to change and diversify whilst still maintaining a capacity to do what the field has always done: meeting the needs of the population with effective solutions.

The field of public health is constantly faced with new challenges. While it is usually the emergent infectious diseases that hit the headlines and that make public health successes more conspicuous, in reality these outbreaks represent just one facet of the complex, multi-factorial and often entrenched challenges that public health professionals have to tackle. Some, such as global warming, are new and lie outside the traditional conceptual framework of the public health field. Others, such as social inequality and poverty, are longstanding but still influence the health of large numbers of people across the world. Tackling the range of public health challenges will require both an acute understanding of the underlying issues and a set of diverse skills and approaches. These challenges will be discussed in the context of the contemporary international public health environment.

5. Conclusion

Public health is really the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through organized efforts of informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals. It means the collective effort of all to increase the control over health determinants and thereby improve health. Public health is the combination of sciences, skills and beliefs that is focused on the maintenance and improvement of the health of all people through collective and informed actions. It could be differentiated from the other health disciplines in such a way that it emphasizes on the health improvement of the society using the knowledge on diseases and health sciences. Primary focus is to prevent the disease and disability by promoting healthy behaviors, environments and to control the occurrence of diseases. It is more concerned with the health status of the whole population of certain areas, communities, groups etc., than of particular individuals. Public health practitioners can achieve these objectives through organized community efforts aimed at the efficient identification, monitoring and addressing the needs on public health through health education, policy development, and conduct research. In nutshell, public health tries to improve the health status of the population through implementation of various health programs, controlling the spread of diseases and elimination of hazards. With growing awareness on the health education, people have made conscious efforts to improve their health habits by implementing the health promotion and strategies. High cost of medical treatments fueled by the diseases has made people aware and take appropriate measures to lead a healthy life. With increasing complexity of diseases and problem of new diseases spreading, the world is in need of stronger public health strategies to improve global health. These public health strategies can bridge the gap arising from global health inequity. So considering the present scenario and the future incidence, public health is the key to improve the health of the society.