What is public health?
Summary
TLDRThis 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
🤔 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.
📊 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.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Public Health
💡Population Level
💡Surveillance
💡Exposure
💡Outcomes
💡Causal Relationship
💡Interventions
💡Behavior Change
💡Risk Factors
💡Health Systems
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
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