what is public health major

what is public health major

The Importance of Public Health Education

1. Introduction to Public Health

Public health has only relatively recently been the exploration of the various influences of public policy, the potential and limits it has on direct and indirect effects on population health status. Public health is to prevent disease and promote health, and its goal is to improve the health of entire populations. This brief statement raises many questions for public health: where is clear and good enough knowledge about causes and preventable measures of diseases? What is the state of the population’s health? What are the best achievable conditions and efforts, and how will it be known what has been accomplished? With increasing health disparities among nations and more within them, public health holds a boundless future of meeting these goals.

Public health has inestimable value to society if it can maximize its practical and political effectiveness. However, the traditional ways of biomedical and social interventions are challenged with increasing costs, competition for scarce resources, and the growing diversity of problems. It has been suggested that the most important change in the new definition of public health was the word “conditions”, to shift the focus of health from primarily non-illness oriented health to all that goes to make for a healthy living. To realize its full potential, public health will need to make a continuous effort to define its unique contribution to society. Public health strategies, recent development, and new dimensions to health policy have the potential for far greater impact on public health. This requires addressing both person and population-based medical care and more fully integrating the two. This will require clearer public health purpose and policies that are related to and supported by evidence-based health services.

Public health strategy is developed in combination with healthcare providers, regulators, paraprofessionals, and the consumer, adding an entirely new dimension to health policy. Decisions are made to allocate resources toward public health functions that will yield the most cost-effective improvements in public health. Public health represents a very broad and evolving set of interventions. These are designed to create conditions in which people can be healthy and focus on one or more interventions. Though infectious disease is a major focus of most public health activity throughout the world, while history has shown great success in this arena, many other interventions have much broader applications and have long been at the core of the public health mission.

The mission of public health is to fulfill society’s interest in assuring conditions in which people can be healthy. The three main public health functions of assessments, policy development, and assurance are achieved through a variety of interventions. Assessment is closely tied to surveillance, which is ongoing and systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health data, essential to the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice. Policy development is the process by which societies make decisions to put resources into interventions. This is closely tied to the process of priority setting. The next function, assurance, is to maintain the conditions which protect and promote health through effective regulations and the full involvement of people in decision making.

Public health is a term which is generally defined as the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities, and individuals. Public health measures are credited with much of the increase in life expectancy since the 19th century. Public health has been defined as “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health and efficiency through organized community effort. The activities to fulfill this mission are often called interventions.

2. Benefits of Pursuing a Public Health Major

Public health jobs are not only found within a government setting. There is a high demand for professionals in the field in the non-profit and private sectors. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are an emerging area of the public health field. NGOs are active in several aspects related to community and global health. This is a great opportunity for individuals interested in international health issues. Public health workers abroad are educating local and global communities and caring for the health of a population. A public health major is also useful for clinical careers. Primarily physicians, public health knowledge and skills are an important asset to any medical professional. Survival rates of patients and overall health are greatly affected by preventive care. A medical degree and public health degree can be combined in several fields.

A degree in public health will give you the tools to become part of the ever-changing healthcare system. The skills of public health professionals are in high demand and the workforce is expanding. A large portion of the workforce is at or near retirement age, so there is a concerning shortage of public health workers coming into the field. This is good news for individuals with a public health degree. Job prospects in the field are expected to grow in the next decade. Public health workers today are focusing on more than disease outbreaks and immunizations; they bring attention to numerous health issues that affect the population as a whole. Public health educators work in a variety of settings, from schools and universities to federal and local government agencies. A degree in the field can easily transition into various administrative roles.

There are several reasons to consider pursuing a degree in public health. Public health is an exciting and growing field with a wide range of career opportunities. Public health workers play an important role in improving the overall health of communities. It is an ideal field for people interested in making a difference in the lives of others. Public health has a cross-disciplinary appeal and is an excellent choice for students from various academic and professional backgrounds.

3. Core Courses in Public Health

Knowing the mission of public health, as well as its distinctive characteristics, the essential services of public health permit the student to understand the foundation during their formal education. The core curriculum for the school of public health, as proposed by the Association of Schools of Public Health, provides an evident outline of the skills and knowledge base necessary for public health. The interdisciplinary methods course teaches students how to assess needs and resources, design and evaluate programs, and apply strategies and precedes to advocate and assure policy change in order to implement and improve health services. Next, the biostatistics course provides students with an understanding of the basic concepts and methodology used to properly apply statistical procedures to analyze public health problems and aid in the decision-making process. This course sets the foundation to understand the strength of evidence in a given finding and to be confident in the interpretation of statistical results. The core MPH epidemiology course provides students with an understanding of the pattern, cause, and effect of health and disease conditions in defined populations. This course emphasizes the classical distribution of disease and the application of this study to improve the health of the defined populations. Lastly, the social and behavioral sciences course provides the method for applying a social ecological framework to identify the health behavior of populations and to determine the impact of behavior change at the individual, group, organization, policy, and community levels. This course identifies the multi-level intervention and helps to draw implications for future intervention research. Completing core courses within the school of public health provides students with the comprehensive foundation needed to understand public health. By knowing public health’s mission and the sciences and skills predisposed knowledge to fulfill that mission, students support their passion for public health and build a sense of identity within the profession. This identity and cause relinquish the potential development of public health as a learned profession.

4. Career Opportunities in Public Health

The workforce is changing with the aging population and the shifting demographics in the United States. There is a large need for generalist public health professionals who are skilled in the area of policy development to work with governments on local and national levels. This includes improving access to care, anti-discrimination measures, and health-promoting legislation. As approximately twenty percent of Americans speak a language other than English at home, more cultural and linguistic competency in health workers is a must. This can also involve improving health access and health outcomes in an underserved population, of which there is growing awareness and an increasing amount of interventions to reduce health disparities between different populations.

The significance of public health is not lost on the individual looking to enter the field, through its many varied and wide-ranging opportunities. As public health largely focuses on the prevention of disease, it leaves many choices for work and research. Whether the focus is on macro-level processes such as health policy development or micro-level involvement in neighborhood community health improvement, there are numerous opportunities to effect change and improve the lives of future generations. This is an attractive aspect for the individual who wishes for a career where there are varied work settings and a chance to move from one to another while still keeping within the same sector, or while being able to change from one part of the health sector to another. Modern work environments, job security, and salary also play a role in whether a career is an attractive choice. Public health careers are varied and gaining in popularity, however, the areas and level of demand can differ widely around the globe.

5. Conclusion: Making a Difference in Public Health

The need for increased prevention in a time-limited office visit makes it important to educate patients to take responsibility for their own health. A well-crafted public health education curriculum can provide medical students with skills to facilitate behavior change in patients. Whether it is anticipatory guidance with new parents, motivational interviewing with a diabetic patient, or advocacy for a patient with non-English speaking, the medical encounter will now focus on empowering the patient to make a change. Public health education skills that are learned through a dedicated curriculum can also provide the physician with an opportunity to temporarily step away from clinical practice and still impact the health of a population. This may be through volunteering for a lead poisoning prevention program, crafting health policy to better serve the underprivileged, or any number of other public health initiatives.

An effective public health education curriculum is more important now than ever. The new era of managed care and restricted health resources has driven a change in focus from individualizing the physician to patients to community-wide medicine. To be effective in today’s society, the physician has to be aware of the health concerns that are prevalent in the community and be able to respond to them. With the aging of the population and rapidly escalating health care costs, doctors are being told that they need to do more prevention in the office.