public health institute

public health institute

The Importance of Public Health Institutes

1. Introduction

Public health is a very wide field and today we have public health institutes dealing with particular ailments and diseases. For example, the Malaria Research Centre, Delhi, is focused on conducting research in improving the prevention, treatment, and control of malaria and it’s a prelude to the roll-back malaria project. Activities and advantages of these institutes are various in nature and mostly beneficial. One at the individual level is that these institutes provide an equal opportunity to stay healthy to an illiterate and a literate person. This is in comparison to the modern era of uprooting ill health, where cost, availability, and quality of health are sometimes too costly to reach the lower rung of society. For example, a pulse polio campaign defines no cost for immunization against polio, and with repeated success, has made a good impact on the public health scenario in India related to polio eradication and prevention.

Undoubtedly, prevention is the best form of cure. It’s not a good idea to wait until people fall ill to do something for their health. People usually seek medical treatment only when they fall sick. Intervention at that stage usually gives less than desired results. For example, a person has been diagnosed with cancer. The cost of treatment for cancer is very high and the chances of getting cured are not certain. The probability of success will be very high if it was detected in the early stage. The high cost of treatment and uncertain outcomes can be converted to certain outcomes and spending very less if the test for cancer was conducted at the early stage. The difference between the cost of health of a person before any disease has affected the body and after the disease has affected the body is called the disability cost. Events like these can often be ploughed back into lucrative schemes for the improvement of public health, often resulting in a net gain. This suggests that effort made in the maintenance of health is a conservative force and is less costly. Public health institutes and organizations whose sole work is focused on prevention and maintenance play a cornerstone role in the preservation and improvement of the health of people. Today, the change in the approach of the health of the public, which previously was focused on prevention, is more towards getting the work done or, in better words, cure at all costs, has made public health institutes more important and instrumental in achieving a healthy society.

Public health is the science of protecting and improving the health of communities through education, promotion of healthy lifestyles, and research for disease and injury prevention. The definition in simple words means the action to prevent disease and other health issues from occurring. J.W. Potter in 1920 defined public health as the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health and efficiency through organized community effort. So, the purpose and role of public health is to focus on changing the behavior and lifestyle of people which is being hampered because of society, community, or a nation. Public health is a combination of science, practical skills, and beliefs aimed at maintenance and improvement of the health status of people through collective and individual actions.

2. Role of Public Health Institutes

It is at this time that public health systems must play their most vital role in reforming themselves into a system that is sustainable and able to address the present and future needs of the community. Public health systems must realize that they can no longer merely focus on minor changes to their current structure, but it is time to face the fact that there are some fundamental changes that must be made to truly shift to a system that can meet the mission. Public health systems must learn to compromise and work together to move forward and build a collective vision for the future because every health system, though different, shares a common measure by the health of the population. Public health systems must also reach out to the community and create a higher level of public awareness on health issues and the role of public health, and create partnerships with leaders in business, education, and healthcare to mobilize support for improved public health endeavors. This is a time of reform for public health systems, and it is essential that they capitalize on their ingenuity and strengths to create a system that will best serve the community.

Public health institutes today face many challenges in keeping the public healthy. They are often faced with a workforce that lacks the full range of necessary competencies and is distributed unequally across the country. New threats such as bioterrorism and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) have added to the workload and raised the public health systems’ concern over their ability to handle these threats as well as the more conventional threats they face every day. Globalization has placed more emphasis on international health, which has led to an increasing shortage of professionals trained in public health and a widening gap in knowledge of best practices in global health. In a time when the population is growing and millions are uninsured, there is an ever greater demand for public health services, particularly for the underserved in the community. All of these challenges have led public health systems to question whether or not they are properly configured to meet the needs of the community and whether they can effectively carry out their mission to prevent disease and promote health.

3. Impact on Community Health

The health and action of communities and wider society is one of the main clear areas and principles of the public health systems, and public health institutes are the main supporting agencies with this issue. So, it could well be argued that the effects and possible outcomes of this would therefore be an important factor in determining the true worth, or otherwise, of the role of the institute on the NHS, and the level of accountability in the long term. This is an area of considerable activity and expectation throughout the NHS, and therefore overcoming the hurdles will be a significant achievement.

Public health institutes have a crucial role to play in responding to the health needs of communities, nationally and locally. Indirectly, the institute will assess the health needs of the people to identify the high priority health issues and the most effective means to address these issues. The findings from the assessment provide the evidence base to develop policies supportive of health and the means to monitor and articulate the implementation of those policies. This will result in the allocation of resources to those issues considered most important to be addressed. Through policy development, public health institutes can influence the behavior of the people of the community as well as identifying wider determinants of the problem at hand. This will, in turn, lead to the empowerment of the people within those communities to take action improving their own health. By taking action on the high priority issues, public health institutes can have a considerable impact on the health status of the population within those communities on both a short and long-term basis.

4. Challenges and Solutions

A common critique against hiring institutes is their excessive bureaucracy. With the large budget of the American Institutes, these three letters are often thrown around. However, the United States should use caution when using this argument. As seen in other countries, elimination of a public institute can lead to such severe consequences as national health threats. For instance, the Instituto de Salud Publica in Chile was dissolved to almost half its original size under Pinochet’s dictatorship. This action contributed to the ending of training programs and research. It also lost much of its regulatory capacity which resulted in serious sanitary problems and under-nutrition in the country. Only recently when the Institute received more funding did it start to recover its national health services.

5. Conclusion

The experiences of the case studies provide a stark contrast with the current global issues in public health. Global health is shifting into a new phase with chronic illness and degenerative disease becoming a key focus point. Global society is becoming more interdependent. Economic interdependency often results in the less powerful nations bearing the health and social consequences of policies made by the more powerful and influential. With the increasing amount of global migration and refugee movements, many societies are becoming more culturally plural. A key issue in global public health is how health equity can be attained for people who are in less powerful positions, or are vulnerable due to being different from the societal norm. The experiences of the case studies can provide lessons and parallels on how group-specific health equity can be attained, even if the groups are marginalized in nature.

At its most simplistic way, health equity could be attained if all people were able to have a standard of living that is conducive to good health. This, however, is a massive problem and questions arise as to what standard of living is needed, and for different groups, this standard varies. To improve the standard for the group that has the worst off, invariably means taking action to enhance living conditions for the worst off. This is the basis for the people of the communities in the 14 case studies in trying to create health equity for their people. This report has shown that there are major issues affecting the health of minority and at-risk communities. These issues often relate back to economic, social, and political factors and the solutions to these issues require massive undertakings to reform policies and systems that are often institutional in nature.

The knowledge and experience of the 14 case studies in this collection provide a strong picture that health equity is relevant within the United States. This understanding is in keeping with the first of the famous Ottawa Charter principles that asserts “The fundamental conditions and resources for health are: peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice, and equity.” This report has demonstrated the complexities of creating health equity. Health equity between different groups in the United States is the focus of many organizations including federal agencies. These organizations instrumental in creating equity demonstrate the understanding that unfair and avoidable disparities in health status exist between population groups. Their efforts are to prevent such disparities occurring again, to alleviate their severity, or eliminate the inequalities. Efforts to improve the health of at-risk groups are often beneficial to the entire population and at times groups with a higher relative advantage, i.e. the MCH programs in New Mexico and efforts to create a National Aboriginal and Islander Health Strategy.