No matter what form public health assumes, its goal is always the same: to improve people's quality of life by focusing on health promotion and disease and injury prevention.
The Ten Essential Public Health Services
Monitor health status to identify community health problems
Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community
Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues
Mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems
Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts
Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety
Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable
Assure a competent public health and personal health care workforce
Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based health services
Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems.
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.
Overall, public health is concerned with protecting the health of entire populations. These populations can be as small as a local neighborhood, or as big as an entire __________.
Public health professionals try to prevent problems from happening or re-occurring through implementing educational programs, developing policies, administering services, regulating health systems and some health professions, and conducting research, in contrast to clinical professionals, such as doctors and nurses, who focus primarily on treating individuals after they become sick or injured. It is also a field that is concerned with limiting health disparities and a large part of public health is the fight for health care equity, quality, and accessibility.
Public health is about health promotion and disease and injury prevention through research, community intervention and education. It also is about eradicating health disparities.
Public health is a diverse and ever-expanding field. Among other things, it involves disseminating reliable information for policy decisions; identifying systemic inequalities and problems; protecting our health and safety through education and research; and fostering partnerships with individuals, communities and organizations to promote good health.
Practitioners of public health carry out their mission through organized efforts that draw upon knowledge from many disciplines to address the physical, mental and environmental health concerns of communities and populations. These disciplines include health policy and management, epidemiology, oral health, family health, behavioral science and health education, health communications, occupational safety, environmental health, public health preparedness and international and global health. Public health practitioners conduct research, teach in schools and colleges, help formulate government policy and work in a number of capacities out in the field.
Who should consider a degree in public health?
Public health is ideal for those that gain satisfaction knowing that they are working to improve the lives of others.
Preventive medicine or preventive care consists of measures taken to prevent diseases, (or injuries) rather than curing them or treating their symptoms. This contrasts in method with curative and palliative medicine, and in scope with public health methods (which work at the level of population health rather than individual health).
The mission of public health is to "fulfill society's interest in assuring conditions in which people can be healthy." The three core public health functions are:
The assessment and monitoring of the health of communities and populations at risk to identify health problems and priorities;
The formulation of public policies designed to solve identified local and national health problems and priorities;
To assure that all populations have access to appropriate and cost-effective care, including health promotion and disease prevention services, and evaluation of the effectiveness of that care.
There are many distinctions that can be made between public health and the clinical health professions. While public health is comprised of many professional disciplines such as medicine, dentistry, nursing, optometry, nutrition, social work, environmental sciences, health education, health services administration, and the behavioral sciences, its activities focus on entire populations rather than on individual patients.
Doctors usually treat individual patients one-on-one for a specific disease or injury. Public health professionals monitor and diagnose the health concerns of entire communities and promote healthy practices and behaviors to assure our populations stay healthy.