Public Health Critical and Reflective Essay

Introduction

Public health involves conducting activities and functions to help the community and the general public on how to act to avoid getting or contracting diseases (CDC 2005, p. 13). Notably, it targets mainly on hygiene and lifestyle issues that should be watched to ensure healthy living in the society. The two regions which are discussed in this paper are the Caribbean region and America; most of the health issues in the Caribbean dwell around diseases associated with the heart, cancer, diabetes, stroke, and overweight (Chloe, Teplin and Abram 2008, p. 153-154). The same issues are considered the leading causes of death in America (Deaton 2002, p13-30). This essay targets to suggest the programs and measures which should be put in place to ensure that the residents from these two regions practice healthy living to counter the identified killer diseases (De wit eta.al 2010). To provide this public health officer and specialist conduct several activities such as; restaurant and hotel inspection, scientific research on emerging diseases, health education to the general public on matters of healthy living and developing policies to support the activities of public health (Clark 1999, p.41-48). Gibbs reflective model is used as a guide in the essay since it provides steps that should be followed to ensure active public health practice (Coleman et al. 2007, p. 213-134). Public health is of big concern in most countries since, it forms part of the organization and groups that aims to improve the health of the general public other parties include the hospitals and non-governmental organizations (Correa 2001, p.112-205). To enable the public health services to perform their duty of offering health services voluntary, most countries the United States being one of them have developed policies to ensure that the public health services are well organized (Coughlin, Soskolne and Goodman 1997, p. 212-234).

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In the United States the American public health association has the mandate of coming up with the public health policies while in the Caribbean; the Caribbean public health agency is responsible for developing the strategies are to aid the public health agencies in service delivery (Carter, allen and Henson 1989, p. 181-187). This essay looks at public health policies and public health strategy as the programs that help the public health services to achieve their objectives.

Public Health Policy

The main aim of the Caribbean public health agency is to enable the public health services to come up with evidence based health policies, the formulation of such policies will enable the public health services to narrow done the scope of their services(D and Bray 2015, p. 359-386). To ensure the availability of solid evidence the body has to conduct thorough research on the public health issues so as to identify the issues which need more attention than others (Daniels, Kennedy and Kawachi 1999, p. 215-251). According to Caribbean public health agency (CARPHA) (Morgan 2012), the Caribbean states have an evidence informed decision network (Danse et al. 1997, p. 71-84). The developed of this decision network is to ensure that the policy makers, the stakeholders and the general public are well informed on the rising concern of the public health which in the long run help in coming up with an effective policy to address the issues (De Keuster, Lamourex and Kahn 2006, p.482-487). In order to ensure that the public health concerns are critically addressed the evidence based system provides knowledge to the general public and major stakeholders to help in ensuring that there is an informed population (De Wit et al. 2010, p.230-235). The system also provides a platform to enable the scientist who are in charge of research to share their views with the policy makers so as to device the best ways to address the public health issues (Deaton 2002, p. 13-30). Lastly the evidence based network ensures that public health professionals when undertaking their training are equipped with crucial skills such as system analysis so as to make it easy for the formulation of policies (Deyo et al. 2010, p. 1259-1265). By the use of this approach the Caribbean states will not only provide an effective public health service but also quality health care to the population since the public health professionals will be working in a narrow scope to address the issues.

In the United States of America, the American public health association is the professional body that comprises of public health professionals from across the country (Duncan et al. 2012, p. 156-162). The body serve as the major decision makers in all the issues concerning public health in the country, American public health association (ARPHA) (Lappe and Last 2010) is responsible for coming up with the policy statements which address the public health issues in the country (Ebbeling, Pawlak and Ludwig 2004, p.473-482). The association works together with the law makers, general public and the researchers to identify key public health issues which pose as a great threat to the country (Fagerstrom 1978, p. 235-241). The information platforms such as websites, and social media pages, and scientific reports enable the body to develop policies addressing public health concerns which are considered critical from the information collected (King et al. 2008, p. 200-212). According to (Adler and Stewart 2010), public health and health issues cannot be solved by providing infrastructure to boost quality health care but there is a rising need to develop measures which help in preventing the occurrence of the diseases in the first place hence the need to develop policies to help in the same (Fakude 2003, p. 49-55). The presence of public health policies in the United States and the Caribbean can be used as a program to address public health concerns.

Public Health Strategy

Notably, to control health issues and the spread of diseases in a country it is important that countries device ways to reduce the spread of diseases from one part of population to the other (French et al. 2010). The Caribbean common market and Caribbean community, had to device ways in order to reduce the spread of diseases from one state of the Caribbean region to the other (Glanz and Bishop 2010, p. 399-418). These strategies were developed in order to reduce the spread of communicable diseases and the high child mortality rates. The Caribbean union agreed that public health professionals should be part of an association body together with the university graduates so as to enable them to move freely from one state to the other, by allowing the free movement of the people with the relevant skills and knowledge on health issues the health care is improved across the entire region and hence the reduction in mortality rates due to child birth and communicable diseases (Glasgow, Vogt and Boles1999, p. 1322-1327).

Cancer being among the leading killer diseases in the United States other than obesity and heart diseases has led to the country coming up with strategic plan to reduce the high rate of contracting cancer in the country (Haskell et al. 2007). In order to help in tracking the prevalence of cancer and other chronic diseases the United States uses behavioral risk factor system (BRFSS). This is a strategy which enables the all population to be monitored easily by the use of one system, the system no only help in identification of chronic diseases but it also provides an information platform to enable the public health professionals to share information concerning proper healthy living to the general public (Hoehner et al. 2013, p.31-40). The system has been developed in such a way that it can be operated on many devices including mobile phones, this system enables the people to record their daily health conditions on the system database (Israel et al. 1998, p. 173-202). The data obtained from the database enable the public health service to identify the various chronic diseases by viewing the description provided by the users (Janssen and LeBlanc 2010, p. 40). This system helps the public health officers to respond to emergencies especially in the case of diseases which kills faster like Ebola.

Gibb's Reflective Cycle

According to (Dye 2011, p.230), the Gibbs reflective model has the following stages:

Description

This paper reflects on the position of public health services in the regions of the Caribbean and America. The main reason why people are at risk in the United States is that of environmental hazards, chronic diseases, and mental illness (Kass 2001, p. 132-143). The health issues which pose a threat in this two regions are; heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, overweight, and stroke. According to the report by the (Mailman school of public health 2007), it was evident that 10% of the immigrants were from the Caribbean to the united states, of which most of those victims who have cancer in the Caribbean were infected with cervical cancer, liver, esophagus and stomach cancer (Koplan et al. 2009, p. 1993-1995). In America, the most rampant cancer is that of; breast, prostate and lung cancer (Lambert and Hartsough 1998, p. 533-544). In the report by national cancer institute, it is recorded that an estimate of 609,640 patients in the United States was cancer-based, it was further documented that an approximately 38.4% of the population are likely to be diagnosed with cancer basing from the data collected in 2013-2015 (Zaridze, Boyle and Smans 1984).

Health inequality poses a threat to public health because people at various levels have access to other services which others do not, this is the case for the immigrants from the Caribbean to the United States (Yancik and Ries 2000, p. 200-210). Environmental factors also contribute to the inequalities because those people who are exposed to harsh environmental factors are in likely position to be infected. The presence of bodies such as World Health Organization (WHO) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is there to ensure that economic or political factors do not contribute to the inequality in delivering health services (Anand et al. 2004, p. 145-156).

Public health services use principles from these bodies to ensure that all the people in a given country have access to health services since the absence of access to such services means that the public health is failing in their work (Leeb 2008, p. 231-246).

Feelings

In the Caribbean region where the economic rate of most people is low, there is a high probability of them failing to get adequate health services (Lewis 2015, p. 473-475). Often, this issue brings about the high possibility of those people acquiring chronic diseases unlike those who can access quality health care like the Americans (Lloyd-Jones et al. 2010, p. 321-342). From the reports, it is evident that cancer is rampant in the United States and that no one is safe from the probability of being diagnosed with it (Abraido-lanza et al. 2006, p.421-445). With the immigration issues, it is difficult for any of the two states, to entirely curb cancer occurrence since immigrants are not only from one region there are others from different areas which may bear a different kind of cancer or a...