national public health week

national public health week

Importance of National Public Health Week

1. The significance of National Public Health Week

NPHW has been successful in achieving its mission for quite a long time. Its innovative goals and campaigns every year have led to the creation of healthy and stronger communities in the US. It has been successful in bringing together the leaders and professionals from many organizations and communities that are working consistently to improve public health. It helps in understanding the issues and creates awareness among the masses. It is contributing largely to the creation of a new generation of public health professionals and leaders. With the success over the years, NPHW is looking forward to translating the high hopes into high impact and making the US the Healthiest Nation in the year 2030. Step one for this is to involve the people from all walks and have a united effort for better public health. With the recent implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the access to quality healthcare services has improved greatly. Now, the USA needs the collective efforts for improving the preventive and primary healthcare to change the healthcare system from a sickness to wellness model. The US still faces problems of growing chronic diseases, mental illness, and environmental degradation. A high-quality public health system is the only answer to these problems.

National Public Health Week is a growing national effort for spreading the path of greatness of public health. The theme for the year 2014 is to generate “Generation Public Health”. This theme generates a far-reaching goal for bettering public health for the generations to come. This event is handled and organized by the American Public Health Association (APHA) every year in the first full week of April. The sole purpose of this week is to recognize the importance of public health in our society and bring the issues into the limelight. This year, i.e. 2014, National Public Health Week is being celebrated from 7th April to 13th April. This time, APHA has enlisted many broad-level and specific goals to achieve through this event. National Public Health Week is celebrated throughout the US, and even the global community is invited to participate in creating better health for future generations. This event is also celebrated by health and medical colleges/universities across the US by conducting various analytical activities, open discussions and debates, Extempore, etc. on topics related to Public Health.

2. Promoting health awareness and education

National Public Health Week is a great event to recognize and be more knowledgeable about healthcare issues. There are many events that take place during this week. The main focus of the week is to promote public health. One specific event is an essay contest. There are fairs and exhibits held to promote public health as well. Many local organizations and companies partner with NPHW to get their points across to the public. The American Public Health Association will provide help with setting up the event to make it as easy as possible. They will also provide you with a toolkit to help you through the process. We all strive to live a long and healthy life. However, we do not always know what the best route is to achieve that. The NPHW website is a great way of learning the necessary tools to live a healthy life by promoting healthy behaviors and teaching consumers how to make better health choices. Public health is so important because it plays a vital role in prevention. Medicine and treatment can do a lot to help one live a longer life, however, disease prevention is much more cost-effective. Disease prevention does not only benefit the consumer, but it also lowers the cost of healthcare. This is why NPHW is so important in getting this message across to everyone. Public health has a main focus of prevention which will help increase the quality of life and years of healthy life. By promoting health education at a young age, it can begin to embed great habits into consumers. This NPHW brings to life what the American Public Health Association is trying to accomplish in the long run to promote healthy Americans.

3. Addressing key public health issues

Healthy People 2010 also identified socioeconomic status as a key determinant of health, setting an objective to eliminate health disparities in the U.S. by the year 2010. The document lists ten leading health indicators, many of which are related to people of lower socioeconomic status. This includes cancer, diabetes, maternal and infant health, heart disease, respiratory disease, and sexually transmitted diseases. Healthy People 2010 targets groups of people who suffer higher rates of these conditions and aims to provide them with better access to prevention programs and healthcare that can improve their health and quality of life. Failure to adequately address these issues in the future will perpetuate the high disease burden experienced by poor and disadvantaged communities.

Socioeconomic status and health: In January 2000, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a groundbreaking report in which they found that individuals of lower socioeconomic status currently experience worse health and shorter lives than those above them economically. This relationship is seen in all age groups, from children to the elderly, and for a wide variety of diseases and health statuses. Stress and depression are shown to account for many of these adverse health effects. The report also found that there is a graded relationship between socioeconomic status and health – the more poverty or lower income a person or community faces, the more disease and shorter life expectancy they face. People of lower socioeconomic status are also more likely to experience many of the risk factors for chronic diseases. These include poor nutrition, tobacco and substance use, and exposure to environmental toxins. The IOM called for the elimination of disparities in health and for prevention of the root causes of disease. This report identified addressing socioeconomic status as the key to improving public health and eliminating health disparities.

4. Engaging communities for better health outcomes

The NPHW initiative will also aim to raise awareness about the many public health practitioners and advocates working on health issues within diverse communities across the city of Toronto. This will be accomplished through an online scavenger hunt and storytelling project that showcases the work of community organizations and health advocates and highlights the connections between their efforts and the NPHW theme. These projects will create valuable learning opportunities for students and will contribute to building a stronger sense of community among NPHW participants.

In health promotion activities within community settings, IHPME students will partner with community organizations to facilitate discussions about health and to create opportunities for the expression of community members’ experiences and perceptions of health. Visual arts and media projects will be used to engage community members in conversations about health and the social determinants of health. With the guidance of community organizations, the student health promotion teams will support community efforts to address health issues that are of importance to them and will seek opportunities for student participation in current community initiatives. These health promotion activities will create valuable opportunities for student experiential learning and will build lasting partnerships between IHPME students and diverse communities in Toronto. A history of past community engagement projects by IHPME students can be found on the Students for Quality Improvement in Healthcare (SQuIRe) website.

This student initiative aims to engage UofT students and the broader community in conversations about health, with an emphasis on the social determinants of health and the economic case for prevention and health promotion. The aim is to bridge the gap between academic research on the economic case for prevention and public understanding of this issue and to mobilize students from a variety of disciplines to think about how they can become advocates for change in addressing health inequalities. This initiative will involve an event hosted at the UofT campus focused on the economic case for prevention and a series of health promotion events within diverse communities in Toronto.

The community engagement program at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health is one of the largest of its kind at a Canadian university. Engaging with a diversity of communities across the city of Toronto is a core component of our school’s mandate, and our students play an important role in that process. The Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME) students propose to take the opportunity of National Public Health Week (NPHW) to launch a student-led health promotion initiative based on the NPHW 2013 theme, “Public health is ROI: Save lives, save money.”

5. Advocating for policy changes to improve public health

Creating and using information materials to educate the public and policymakers about these health issues, and how it is affecting the public/consumers. Getting people to understand and be involved is vital for any policy change to come about. With educating the public and policymakers, you also need them to be concerned about the issue at hand because there are many issues to be concerned about. So, you want the health issue to stand out amongst all others. This can require one to use specific advocacy to certain rules and regulations relative to the health issue. An example would be trying to get a similar policy change or changing previous regulation on health issue x to the tobacco settlement did to the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. With the agreement of changing tobacco marketing aimed at youths and funded a variety of youth anti-smoking programs on the issue you are trying to enforce. This may also involve a lot of two-way discussion with policymakers and possibly requesting a policy be included into a new legislation as a rider. Step one and two will likely take a couple NPHW’s to get it moving but with enough effort, it can lead to stage three, that is focusing public health elections in an effort to promote policymakers who are favorable to this public health issue or to further educate already existing policymakers into the importance of the issue, with aiming to make a policy change.

National Public Health Week is a spring celebration in the United States for awareness of public health happening every year for the first full week of April. So, National Public Health Week is a good stepping stone to focusing on policy changes. For it to happen, it would call on everyone in the U.S. to consider “Where is the health in our country?” and would incite a national dialogue toward focusing on the public’s health. Going for a policy change is a general long (and difficult) process. Depending on the change, it can become quite involved. Involving the process of NPHW to our legislators, getting them to understand the importance and impact of the proposed policy.