public health consultant

public health consultant

The Importance of Public Health Consulting

1. Introduction to Public Health Consulting

Having worked on numerous projects bridging the clinical and public health realms, I have been able to witness the frustration and hope that many of the clinical specialists have for ideas on health prevention and policy. By working with clinical specialists, I have noted the vigor and passion that these people have when discussing ideas which they know will improve the health of their patients. Unfortunately, all too often the best-intentioned ideas on prevention from clinical specialists never come to fruition. This is due to a lack of resources, whether it is personnel, funding, time, or a combination of these. Consequently, clinical specialists rarely have the means or opportunity to solve public health problems on their own. This market failure gives rise to the increasing need for public health consulting.

I have developed a thesis to illustrate the importance of the increasing prevalence of public health consulting. My main thesis is that public health consulting will only become a viable sub-specialty of the larger field once it is able to demonstrate cost-effectiveness, efficiency, and success in improving the health of the population. The purpose of this analysis is to suggest the steps and barriers that need to be overcome for this to become a reality.

2. Assessing Public Health Needs and Priorities

Public health has the noble goal of improving the health of populations. Yet many individuals still have difficulty understanding public health perspectives, approaches, and constraints when compared with clinical medicine. The infrastructure of public health is under assault as people wrestle with the dichotomy between the need of people to have greater security and the desire to minimize the intervention of the state into people’s lives, as well as with increasing pressures to privatize the components traditionally operated by the state. Public health, in its attempts to preserve and gain resources for the health of populations, has to be able to demonstrate that its allocation of resources on health systems through evidence-based strategies will lead to better health outcomes that would occur otherwise. The roles in which public health consultants are involved in health needs and priorities are varied, but this discussion will aim to define a path or common approaches.

Health status and the determinants of health are not distributed equally; disparities are almost always seen when comparing groups defined by social, economic, or environmental criteria. The health problems of special populations such as children, or ethnic groups such as Pacific Islanders, and the health of groups defined by residence, such as inner-city dwellers, always present their own challenges. To assess any health problem in order to be able to do something about it requires good information. For each health problem, there has to be an understanding of its incidence and prevalence and other basic descriptive information. Understanding why the problem is occurring is the job of an epidemiologist. The information gleaned from surveillance and descriptive and analytic epidemiological studies serves as the foundation for work in the prevention and control of disease.

Public health consultants do more than give advice; they help determine which health problems deserve the most attention and which approaches will have the greatest impact. This is a tall order always, but particularly now as governments and private organizations are being urged to spend health dollars more wisely. Understanding the nature of public health and the forces that affect it is the first step in contributing to more effective and satisfying careers as public health consultants. Public health can be defined in many ways. For the purposes of this essay, we will consider it to be the organized efforts of society to keep people healthy and prevent injury, illness, and premature death. This definition covers a lot of territory. People’s health is affected by many forces internal and external to their own bodies.

3. Developing Effective Public Health Strategies

Any analysis of public health policy can have implications across a wide area. In the previous example, a change in dietary interventions can affect food manufacturers, food supply chains, and possibly international trade of foodstuffs. A health impact assessment (HIA) can determine the potential effects of a policy or development on the health of a population. BIAPH is a customized social and economic health impact assessment. Using our comprehensive socio-economic and health toolkits, BIAPH assesses the quality of health data measures, health and social services programs and services, and various other health determinants to assist neighboring communities, health stakeholders, and key decision/policy makers to systematically determine where best to invest their health dollars for the greatest returns for their communities.

Public health consultancies can provide government with the assistance required to determine whether policy implementation will be cost-effective. An example of this would be the implementation of a public health campaign to reduce obesity in the UK. An analysis determined that for the campaign to be effective, it would need to completely change the way that society views food and exercise. This would require massive social and legislative change that would be very expensive to implement, and the analysis found that it was unlikely to be cost-effective. The analysis included development of strategies that may be cost-effective, and it was determined that specific dietary interventions for individuals who are overweight or pre-diabetic would be the most cost-effective measure to take.

Public health consulting is important for the detection and management of health issues, as well as providing a framework for management and leadership in the health sector. The identification of public health issues often begins with government involvement and can become focused at a community level. Government provision of resources is necessary to improve public health, but a cost-benefit analysis should be employed to ensure that resources are used effectively.

4. Implementing and Evaluating Public Health Programs

When translating research into practice, it is often said that a substantial time lag exists between the discovery of new knowledge and its acceptance and integration into routine clinical care. Program implementation is faced with a similar challenge, and on a number of occasions, early termination of a program has resulted in the waste of valuable information and resources. A famous example from health policy is the termination of the community health promotion program, in which a lack of resources and shifting political agendas resulted in its discontinuation before the completion of intended objectives.

To properly implement a program, health professionals should engage in some form of health promotion. This may involve the program taking a policy change, advocating for change in a legal framework, building alliances between organizations, or serving as a catalyst to empower others. No matter what form of promotion is chosen, it is important to remember that the program itself is changing a behavior with the hope of a positive outcome. For example, the intention of immunizing an at-risk population against infectious disease is to prevent them from becoming ill. Often behavior change is a slow process, and programs may meet resistance when trying to change public opinion or an established societal norm.

In order to improve the current health of a community and the population at large, we must concentrate on the effectiveness of implementing a program or intervention. This process involves a series of steps and has led to the development of a science known as health services research. Public health programs usually are developed to address a specific health concern and may be funded by governments, private organizations or independent donors such as a not-for-profit organization or a charitable foundation. It is crucial that at the inception of a program, health professionals have a clear idea of the health status of the community they are serving. A thorough assessment may require collection of primary data, which may be costly and time-consuming. If resources are limited, health professionals may use the community’s existing health and social records to determine prevalent health concerns and available resources. This assessment will help to determine the focus of the program and how its success should be evaluated.

5. Advancing Public Health through Collaboration and Advocacy

An interesting and innovative aspect of the course was virtual participation in the Connect conference, where students were given the opportunity to talk with undergraduate and graduate students in the community and school health education program, while also being able to connect with professionals currently working in community health. This allowed for students to gain knowledge about the work and experiences of community health educators, gain an understanding of professional roles, and how to develop their careers, as well as foster possible mentorships for students who want extra knowledge and guidance about the career and how to gain employment. Overall, this experience was a huge success and it reinforced the idea that connecting with other professionals in the field will benefit the students in their careers.

Collaboration and advocacy are critical elements in the practice of public health. PHL 515 students will be better able to appreciate the value in working with other organizations in the community and understand strategies for successful collaboration. By working on the first group project, students are given an opportunity to identify key features of a community organization and make an educated selection on which organization to work with to fulfill the requirements of the project. Applying principles from strategic management and marketing research, students also develop an understanding of how to identify community health needs and employ services to meet those needs in the future. All of these skills and knowledge are very important as they are what make the difference between an effective or ineffective program to improve community health.