public health essay examples

public health essay examples

The Importance of Public Health Education

1. Introduction

Public health education not only deals with how to prevent illness and promote wellness, but it also provides an outline of thought. It teaches a wide range of parenting and child rearing, economic, and political science. It varies from this with emphasizing the fact that successful things have been done in the proper way. With its education, it can help to create an easy art of living, a value implementation of public policy, birth matching illness case and its conversion prevention/plan into wellness, until achieving a wellness society with the hoped-for freedom from all disabling conditions.

Public health education offers knowledge regarding better living. This education draws teachers from many science courses: biology, physics, chemistry, zoology, mineralogy, anthropology, sociology, child care, public policy, not to mention medicine and its subspecialties. In result, those with public health educations are helpful for community emergency preparedness.

2. The Role of Public Health in Society

Public health plays an important role in disease prevention. The United States has many infectious disease surveillance systems that are used to monitor the spread of infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is the nation’s premier public health agency, working to ensure healthy people in a healthy world. The CDC is recognized for its work in infectious disease control and its use of epidemiology (the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations) to identify health problems and disperse solutions to these problems. By utilizing various surveillance systems and programs, along with collaboration with healthcare providers, the CDC is able to identify trends in infectious diseases and provide vital information to individuals. Local public health agencies also work in disease surveillance and intervention, as most states have a department of health with infectious disease units. For example, the Texas Department of State Health Services has numerous programs for infectious disease prevention and control, including the Immunization Unit, the Tuberculosis Elimination Program, and the Zoonosis Control Program. Throughout the world, infectious diseases pose a continuous threat to populations. If it were not for the efforts of public health and the CDC, many infectious diseases would have the potential to spread quickly and cause extensive harm. By identifying health trends, the CDC is able to develop and implement public health strategies used to prevent or control various health outcomes. This is also known as policy development, an interdisciplinary process of developing practical solutions to health problems. An example of health policy created from an analysis of data conducted by the CDC is the recommendation that all individuals born between 1945 and 1965 be tested for hepatitis C. This policy comes in response to data showing high rates of hepatitis C infection among “baby boomers” and a lack of awareness of the infection among the population. In hopes of curtailing hepatitis C and preventing liver disease and cancer, the hepatitis screening would identify infected persons and allow them to access treatment and ultimately reduce the risk of severe liver-related adverse outcomes.

3. Benefits of Public Health Education

Another benefit to public health education is the development of public policies, a use of information to build and maintain healthy environments and communities. Through the education of the public on risk factors of tobacco use and exposure to secondhand smoke, policies have been implemented to minimize exposure to smoking in many public places and work environments. This parallels to educating about the environment and how certain chemicals and substances can affect air and water quality and how to address these issues with a focus on prevention. With the recent rise of childhood obesity, public health education has also become a means to develop policies that can address the growing trend of unhealthy children and to set new standards to reverse the trend. Taking into account health in all policies, it is clear that the modern public health professional is an agent of social and institutional change.

Public health education has many benefits both for people and for the communities that they reside in. There are many benefits to public health education but here are a few that are the most impactful. Directing healthcare resources at education and preventative measures reduces the amount of money and manpower that is spent on treatment. By allocating resources in education to the most at-risk populations, we can keep watching trends of increased risk and catch early signs of diabetes or other chronic diseases. Early onset and prevention can decrease an increasingly costly lifetime battle with the disease and the amount of medications required. Immunization is a major prevention success story. Through a systematic approach to education the public about risk factors, and the availability and effectiveness of immunization, we were able to tackle a major cause of disability and death among children.

4. Challenges in Public Health Education

The education of the public in health matters has three main challenges. The first is to convince the public and the professional men that it is a subject worthwhile taking notice of. Most people are only willing to consider health when it is menaced or lost, and it is not an easy matter to explain to a beer-soaked multitude living in industrial squalor, with a precarious livelihood and a bleak future, that they might have something much better than their present state – might have unwonted length of days, ease and sufficiency, which could be theirs for the asking did they but know the way. It is still more difficult to persuade such people that their children might grow up into good stock, instead of being an article of damaged merchandise nowadays bought dearly and sold cheap. The depression of the social environment has largely killed hope and ambition in these classes, and it is the part of wise philanthropy to seek a change of their conditions with what consent may be obtainable. Meanwhile, they should be taught to take such steps in their private and domestic lives as are possible towards better health, and though there are many hindrances to the experiment, we should have ever in view certain pioneering ventures of the past which have proven the possibility of civic amelioration. The splendid sanitation of certain garrison stations and Indian hill towns under our sway has shown, at least in comparison with the native lines, that it is possible to secure health in places where men in their ordinary conditions do not possess it.

5. Conclusion

The world has seen many ways that have become a factor in the deterioration of health status of its population. General pattern of living standards has improved, people have started to become more literate in terms of their health and have realised the significance of adopting a healthy lifestyle. But major developments have taken place only recently. The reason for such a late realization of the importance of health to a quality life may be the inherent interest of man in materialistic pursuits where he forgot to enjoy life in his work fervor. He discovered the harsh fact that he cannot enjoy a healthy standard of living if there is no quality health. A major part of this realization is due to the effort of health education. This will be possible through “informing and empowering people about health issues to help change individual and collective behavior towards a better quality of life”. This process will not be an event, but a dynamic and ongoing process during the course of each individual’s life and the changing societies. Health was not considered as an important factor of life until then, an era of development and wonders in every field which can be called mahadassanapudha (great inheritance) but a dark future. This process will be slow at its beginning, will gain great momentum as people will be aware of its utility. Behavior change is difficult and complex, this is important to health be it preventive or promotional. Why only people, but health personnel too require the understanding the importance of health education, its aims and its objectives. Today’s health care and its system have more problems on the quality of care and its effectiveness. To do so health personnel need to be correct in their facts of what they need to do, and learn effective means of doing so. This can be attained through education from the vast amount of literature of health education from the myriad of journals and books, and better obtain an access to World Wide Web which is full of information of all sorts. No man is perfect, so errors and omissions are common; but the challenging and ever-changing needs of the people of today, may be the pace of health education can improve an already good quality of care. This includes more research on the subject in different locations so that it becomes the mirror of the society and its an ever-evolving cyclical process, research of the present will influence the future and the futuristic needs today need an answer ready for tomorrow.