What is public health?

Summary

This video explores the concept of public health, offering a simple definition: Public Health addresses health at a population level. It distinguishes public health from clinical medicine, which focuses on individuals, while public health targets groups, whether local or global. Public health professionals focus on two core tasks: understanding through surveillance and research, and acting through interventions. Their goals include promoting health, preventing disease, and ensuring access to care. The video also discusses how health systems can improve capability and capacity to provide equitable and effective treatment for populations.

Takeaways

• 🌍 Public health focuses on health at a population level, distinct from individual clinical care.
• 📊 Public health professionals aim to understand and act, using surveillance and research to inform interventions.
• 🔍 Surveillance helps to gather data on risk factors, interventions, and outcomes, analyzing their distribution and magnitude.
• 🔗 Understanding the causal relationship between exposures and outcomes is key for planning effective interventions.
• 🚨 Public health seeks to prevent disease by promoting healthy behaviors and reducing exposure to physical, environmental, and social risks.
• 🚭 Behavior change efforts include promoting positive health habits like exercise and diet, while deterring harmful ones like smoking.
• 🌱 Addressing social determinants of health, such as human rights violations or gender discrimination, is crucial for improving public health.
• 🏥 Public health professionals ensure equitable access to safe and effective treatment for people who are unwell.
• ⚖️ Health systems need both capability (governance, leadership, planning) and capacity (finance, resources) to function effectively.
• 📈 A strong public health system results in better healthcare access and outcomes, improving population-wide health.

Q & A

What is the simple definition of public health provided in the script?

Public health is a discipline that addresses health at a population level.

How does public health differ from clinical medicine and other paramedical disciplines?

Public health focuses on groups of people, including both sick and healthy individuals, whereas clinical medicine and other paramedical disciplines like physiotherapy treat individual patients.

What two main things do public health professionals aim to do?

Public health professionals aim to understand health issues at a population level and take action based on that understanding.

How do public health professionals gather the necessary understanding of population health?

They conduct surveillance and research to study risk factors (exposures) and outcomes (like disability and disease), focusing on their distribution and magnitude.

Why is it important to understand the causal relationship between exposures and outcomes?

Understanding this relationship helps public health professionals plan effective interventions that can improve public health.

What are the two ways public health professionals act to prevent disease and disability?

They promote behavior change (e.g., healthier lifestyles) and reduce exposure to physical, environmental, and social risk factors.

What are some examples of promoting behavior change in public health?

Promoting healthier diets, encouraging exercise, and deterring harmful behaviors like smoking.

What are the two types of risk factors public health professionals address?

Physical and environmental risk factors (e.g., water contaminants, unsafe medicines) and social determinants of health (e.g., human rights violations, gender discrimination).

How do public health professionals ensure care and treatment for people who are unwell?

They advocate for policy changes that ensure equitable access to health services and ensure that health systems have the capacity and capability to provide care.

What is meant by 'health system capability' and 'health system capacity'?

'Capability' refers to what a health system can do (based on planning, leadership, etc.), while 'capacity' refers to how much it can do, depending on available resources like money, products, and personnel.

Outlines

00:00

🤔 What is Public Health?

The speaker introduces the concept of public health, discussing how it is often defined in verbose and complex ways. They propose a simple definition: public health is a discipline that addresses health at a population level, unlike clinical medicine that focuses on individuals. The speaker emphasizes that public health includes both healthy and sick populations and can operate on a local, national, or global scale. The discussion sets the stage for exploring what public health professionals do.

05:01

📊 Understanding Public Health: Gathering Information

The speaker explains that public health professionals focus on two main activities: understanding and acting. To understand population health, they gather data through surveillance and research to analyze exposure (risk factors and interventions) and outcomes (disease and disability). They seek to determine the distribution and magnitude of these factors—both geographically and across social groups. This helps establish causal links between exposures and outcomes, which then inform intervention planning.

🛠 Acting on Public Health: Intervention

The speaker shifts focus to how public health professionals act on their understanding by intervening to improve population health. Interventions focus on preventing disease and disability by promoting behavior change (e.g., encouraging healthier lifestyles) and reducing exposure to risks (e.g., environmental hazards or social determinants like discrimination). They aim to keep healthy people well while ensuring the sick receive care. Effective interventions require strong evidence and collaboration across sectors.

⚖ Ensuring Care for the Unwell

Public health professionals also ensure that those who are sick have access to effective care. This involves advocating for policy changes based on evidence, ensuring equitable access to health services, and strengthening health systems. Health systems need both 'capability' (the ability to provide certain services) and 'capacity' (resources like funding, staff, and supplies) to meet the needs of populations. These systems are critical for providing care and treatment at scale.

📚 Public Health: A Broad Field

In conclusion, the speaker reiterates that public health addresses population-level health concerns and summarizes the roles of public health professionals. While their explanation covers key aspects, they note that public health is a broad field encompassing more than the topics discussed. The audience is encouraged to place their study or work in the context of this broader set of activities.

Keywords

💡Public Health

Public health is defined as a discipline that addresses health at a population level, rather than focusing on individual care. The video emphasizes that public health works with groups of people, including both the sick and the well, aiming to improve the health of entire populations through surveillance, research, and interventions.

💡Population Level

This term refers to the scale at which public health operates. Unlike clinical medicine, which treats individuals, public health addresses the health needs of groups or communities, such as a country or even globally. The video highlights how public health looks at trends, distributions, and risk factors affecting entire populations.

💡Surveillance

Surveillance in public health is the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data. It helps professionals understand exposure to risk factors and the outcomes such as disease. The video explains that surveillance is key to understanding the distribution and magnitude of health issues across different geographical and sociological contexts.

💡Exposure

Exposure refers to the factors or interventions that affect population health, such as risk factors like smoking or protective measures like vaccines. The video discusses how understanding exposure is crucial for linking it to health outcomes, which helps public health professionals plan effective interventions.

💡Outcomes

Outcomes are the health-related results of various exposures, such as disease, disability, or well-being. Public health professionals aim to understand the distribution and magnitude of these outcomes to determine how different populations are affected and where to focus efforts for improving health.

💡Causal Relationship

This refers to the connection between an exposure (e.g., smoking) and a health outcome (e.g., lung cancer). In public health, establishing causal relationships helps professionals design interventions that target the root causes of health issues. The video notes that understanding these relationships improves the planning and effectiveness of public health programs.

💡Interventions

Interventions are actions taken to improve public health by reducing risk or promoting protective behaviors. These could include policy changes, health campaigns, or community programs. The video mentions two types of interventions: promoting behavior change (e.g., encouraging exercise) and reducing exposure to risk (e.g., removing water contaminants).

💡Behavior Change

Behavior change refers to the efforts in public health to encourage people to adopt healthier behaviors, such as exercising or quitting smoking, and avoid harmful ones. The video discusses how public health professionals promote these changes to prevent disease and improve overall population health.

💡Risk Factors

Risk factors are variables that increase the likelihood of a negative health outcome. These can include lifestyle choices (like smoking), environmental hazards (like unsafe water), or social determinants (like poverty). The video emphasizes the role of public health in identifying and mitigating these risks to prevent disease.

💡Health Systems

Health systems are the organizations, institutions, and resources dedicated to improving health. The video explains that public health professionals work to ensure that health systems have both the capability (what they can do) and capacity (how much they can do) to provide care and treatment to those in need. This includes everything from governance to human resources.

Highlights

Public health is a discipline that addresses health at a population level, different from clinical medicine which focuses on individuals.

Public health looks at groups, including both sick and well people, and those groups can range from communities to countries to global populations.

Public health professionals focus on two primary tasks: understanding health issues through research and surveillance, and acting to improve public health.

Understanding population health involves studying the magnitude and distribution of health exposures and outcomes.

Exposures include risk factors and interventions, while outcomes include diseases and disabilities.

Distribution in public health refers to both geographic and sociological factors, such as the spread across regions or among socioeconomic groups.

The better the understanding of causal relationships between exposures and outcomes, the better public health professionals can plan effective interventions.

Public health interventions focus on promoting behavior change and reducing exposure to risk factors, aiming to prevent disease and disability.

Behavior change efforts include promoting healthy habits like improved diet and exercise, while deterring harmful behaviors such as smoking.

Risk reduction focuses on both physical risks like environmental contaminants and social determinants like human rights violations.

Public health also ensures equitable access to care and treatment for people who are unwell, relying on evidence-based policy changes.

Effective public health systems must balance capability (planning, governance, information management) and capacity (resources like finance and human labor).

Capacity in public health systems is often a function of available resources—more finance and personnel can increase a system's capacity to treat people.

Public health professionals aim to ensure that health systems are in place and functioning to provide care and treatment to those in need.

This overview of public health touches on the broader activities within the discipline, providing a schematic framework for understanding the field.

Transcripts

today we're going to explore the

question what is public health I get

asked this question about once a week

what is public health what do you mean

by public health now if you look up a

definition of Public Health if you look

it up online or look it up in a

dictionary you're going to get something

that's verbose it's going to be wordy

it's going to be flowery what I'm going

to do is a little different I'm going to

say look let's have a very simple

definition of Public Health and then as

a separate question let's ask what do

public health professionals do so really

what we're going to have is a simple

definition and then some complimentary

jibba Jaber so here's my definition of

Public Health public health is a

discipline that addresses Health at a

population level no more no less that's

the definition now we can add on some

complimentary jibber jabber to try and

understand that a little better so for

example we might want to talk about the

fact that public health is different

from Clinical medicine and other

paramedical disciplines like

Physiotherapy and occupational therapy

which deal with patients at an

individual level Public Health really

looks at groups of people and those

groups include sick and well people and

those groups are delineated at any level

that you it could be a community it

could be a country and of course it

could be Global Health now let's take a

closer look at the second question what

do public health professionals do well

public health professionals try to do

two things really the first is to

understand and the second is to act now

let's look at each of these components

separately and then we'll look at how

they work together when I say that

Public Health Works to understand I

really mean that we gather information

and evidence that will inform how it is

that we interv and act to understand

population Health we do two things

really we do surveillance and we do

research we're trying to learn more

about what we call exposure so exposure

could be risk factors it could be

interventions and we're trying to

understand outcomes disability and

disease and with respect to all of these

factors we want to understand their

distribution and their magnitude so

magnitude is kind of self-explanatory

it's how big how much and with respected

distribution we mean distribution

geographically so physically where are

these exposures and outcomes and of

course we mean distribution

sociologically across for example

different socioeconomic groups or

cultures Etc so we're doing the

surveillance and this research to

understand the distribution and the

magnitude of exposures and outcomes so

that we can do two things firstly we

want to understand the causal

relationship between exposures and

outcomes and secondly we want to plan

interventions to improve public health

and of course these two things are

connected so the better we understand

the causal relationship between

exposures and outcomes the better we can

plan interventions that we know will

work work and will have an impact on

public health so we've talked about the

first area where public health

professionals work and we've shown how

this all leads to a point where we've

got a better understanding of how it is

that we can intervene and plan programs

that have an impact on public health and

so this of course leads us to the second

area that public health professionals

work which is to act in other words we

want to act on that understanding right

so we intervene really in two ways we

want to keep healthy people as healthy

as possible and we want to ensure that

people that are unwell have access to

care and treatment so let's look at the

first one first what do we do to prevent

disease and disability well we do two

things firstly we promote Behavior

change and secondly we reduce exposure

to risk and of course as you can imagine

there's a lot of overlap between those

two so with respect to promoting

Behavior change there's really two

things that we try to do we want to

promote Behavior firstly that we know

will have a positive impact on health

like improved diet exercise Etc and of

course we want to deter behavior that we

know will have a delarius effect on

public health like smoking then with

respect to actions that we take to

reduce exposure to risk we do this by

addressing two kinds of risk firstly

there's the physical and environmental

risk factors that people are exposed to

things like radiation water contaminants

unsafe medicines and secondly there's

what we call the Social determinance of

health things like human rights

violation gender discrimination Etc so

now we've talked about what we do to

prevent disease and disability in

otherwise healthy people now let's talk

about what we need to do to ensure that

care and treatment is available for

people who are unwell so as you can

imagine I'm going to tell you that

there's two things that we do the first

thing that we're going to do is we're

going to use best evidence so we're

going to lean on that understanding that

I referred to in the first half of this

talk and we're going to use that to

advocate for policy change that ensures

Equitable access to safe and effective

treatment in other words we want to make

sure that all people have access to

health services and the second thing we

need to do and of course it's related to

the first is that we need to ensure that

the health systems are in place to

provide care and treatment for people

that need it now Health Systems can be

thought of as two things the first is

capability and the second is capacity

capability is what you're able to do

what you're capable of doing and this is

really a function of things like Health

Service planning governance leadership

Information Management Etc and then

there's the other side of Health Systems

it's what we call capacity how much

you're able to do and this tends to be a

function of Finance products and human

resources in other words the more money

the more products and the more people

you throw into the health system the

more capacity the health system has in

other words more people will get treated

so that's really Public Health in a

nutshell like I said at the beginning

the definition of Public Health is that

it's a discipline that addresses Health

at a population level what it is that

public health professionals do well

that's a slightly longer conversation

what I've talked about here is certainly

not comprehensive I mean there's more to

Public Health in what I've mentioned but

this is perhaps a good schematic that

you can use to place the studying or the

work that you're doing in the context of

a broader set of activities thank you

for listening I hope you found this

useful