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• Public Health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through:

  • Sanitation of the environment
  • Control of community infections
  • Education of individuals in principles of proper hygiene
  • Organization of medical and nursing services for early diagnosis and preventive treatment of diseases
  • Development of social machinery (Charles Edward Amory Winslow, 1920)
• Public Health deals with:

  • Surveillance of emergence of diseases
  • Identification of disease among the community
  • Investigating factors that contribute to the existence of diseases
  • Educating the community regarding ways to prevent acquiring diseases
  • Creation of strategies to ensure sustained well-being among the community
  • Provision of health services
  • Institutionalizing lessons learned through policies and structures to prevent the occurrence of similar or other diseases
  • Monitoring the health status of the community and providing means to sustain their health and well-being
• Characteristics of Public Health:

  • Focuses on preventive rather than curative aspects of health
  • Focuses on the population level rather than individual level health issues
• • Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable
  • Assure a competent public health and personal healthcare workforce
  • Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal & population-based health services
• 3 Core Functions of Public Health:

  1. Assessment:

  • Monitor health status to identify community health problems
  • Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community

  2. Policy Development:

  • 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

  3. Assurance:

  • Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety
• Community Health:

  • Study and improvement of the health characteristics of a community
  • Deals with processes that enable communities to maintain and sustain their health and well-being
• 5 Core Elements of a Community:

  1. Locus or Sense of Place: Something which can be located or described, sense of place, locale, or geographic boundaries

  2. Sharing: Shared perspectives and common interests, sharing of values, ideologies, activities, etc.

  3. Joint Action: Source of community cohesion and identity (e.g., conversing, volunteering together)

  4. Social Ties: Interpersonal relationships, includes families, siblings, cousins, roommates, support groups, etc.

  5. Diversity: Describes as the stratification among the members, "A community within a community"
• Community Development:

  • Important strategy in nation-building
  • Process where community members come together to take collective action and generate solutions to common problems
  • Geared towards changing institutions and structures that will nurture equitable progress at all social aspects
  • Requires participation and active contribution of members in varying levels of effort and accountability
• System:

  • Organized collection of units interacting in various forms to accomplish specific functions or goals
  • The community can be dissected into other forms of systems like political system, health system, social class system based on ethnicity, religious affiliation, or economic class
  • Each has its own subsystems
  • A community is composed of units like families, households, villages, neighborhoods, districts
• Classifications of a Community:

  1. Rural:

  • Usually small with people engaged in farming, fishing, and food gathering

  2. Suburban:

  • Low-density areas that separate residential and commercial areas from one another
  • Areas adjacent to the city or surrounding the city

  3. Urban:

  • High density, socially heterogeneous population, complex structure, non-agricultural occupation
• Health:

  • State of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO)
• Aspects of Health:

  • Physical Health: Condition enabling a person to maintain a strong and healthy body
  • Mental Health: Refers to how a person thinks of himself, controls his emotions, and adjusts to the environment
  • Social Health: Refers to ways a person feels, thinks, and acts towards everybody around him
• Determinants of Health:

  • Income and social status
  • Education
  • Physical environment
  • Employment and working conditions
  • Social support networks
  • Culture
  • Genetics
  • Personal behavior and coping skills
  • Health services
  • Gender
• Levels of Health Care:

  Primary:

  • Activities or services provided by a health care professional acting as the first point of contact or consultation for all patients within a health care system
  • Deals with preventive care, performing strategies and interventions

  Secondary:

  • Provided by medical specialists and other medical professionals to whom a primary health care professional has referred
  • Focuses on specialized types of services

  Tertiary:

  • More specialized form of care
  • Services are advanced for complex medical cases
• • Fewer patients compared with primary and secondary care (e.g., cancer management, neurosurgeries)
• 5 Steps of Public Health Approach in Addressing Health Problems in the Community:

  1. Define the health problem

  2. Identify the risk factors associated with the problem

  3. Develop and test community-level interventions to control or prevent the cause of the problem

  4. Implement interventions to improve the health of the population

  5. Monitor those interventions to assess their effectiveness
• Levels of Prevention:

  • Primary Prevention: Prevents illness or injury from occurring by preventing exposures to risk factors
  • Secondary Prevention: Seeks to minimize the severity of illness or damage due to an injury-causing event once the event has occurred
  • Tertiary Prevention: Seeks to minimize disability by providing medical care and rehabilitation services