The Unique Contributions of Public Health Practice to Improving Population Health

Public health practices aid in achieving better health outcomes, which can be personal, communal or societal. Public health has a major role in disease prevention, primary care, and general health promotion among the citizens. There are three essential phases of public health: promotion, prevention, and protection.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Public health practice has a unique contribution to improving public health, different from the medical approach. Public health is concerned with the entire community as its patient and it tries to enhance the health of that population. The public health approach has a unique role to ensure a healthy society through analyzing the causes of unsustainable and unhealthy practices, and addressing the ecosystem damage, biodiversity loss, global warming, non-biodegradable wastes, and overconsumption of resources. The role of public health is to protect the general public against outbreaks of pandemics. It also deals with any other health issues in the society. On the contrary, medical health practice focuses on healing a sick or ill patient. The medical approach diagnoses at an individual's illness or health problems and prescribes medicines and drugs to ensure his or her well-being. Thorough medical tests accompany medical approaches (Scutchfield & Keck, 2009).

Public health practice has a unique focus on populations, emphasizing on prevention and promotion of healthy leaving for a whole community. The aspects of public health include interventions for safe human behavior, environment, and medical care. Public health focuses on epidemiology, toxicology, observes global health, and specializes in substantive health issues including nutritional and environmental health.

Public health practice consists of systems with the main effort of improving community health. The systems can be private, public, or voluntary entities that help in the delivery of public health within particular jurisdictions. These include the local and state public safety agencies, providers of health care, public health agencies, charity, and human services organizations, education organizations, youth development organizations, environmental agencies, and philanthropic or economic organizations. Their roles are to protect, prevent, and promote healthy public (Scutchfield & Keck, 2009). The practices of public health include to monitor the public's health status, investigate health issues, educate and inform, mobilize communities to curb health issues, come up with policies and plans, research to innovate new evidence-based approaches, evaluate health activities, ensure competent health practitioners and workforce, link people to health facilities, and enforce regulations and policies regarding health services. The core roles of public health are to assess community health, develop policies, assure health services, and offer overall health services regardless of people's ability to pay for the services.

Public health also uses an ecological perspective, which incorporates holistic criteria of the community's wellbeing. The significance of this perspective is that it focuses on both the population and individual levels of health interventions. Some of the considerations to ensure public health include environmental factors, human characteristics, social climate, and organizational and physical settings. The ecological perspective of public health ensures that all the prevention, protection, and health promotion avenues are utilized fully (Scutchfield & Keck, 2009).

The goal of public health practice is to promote the social, mental, and physical well-being of people in a community or society. Public health ensures the quality of life by controlling and preventing diseases, disabilities, and injuries. The mission is to create environments, conditions, and contexts within which people within a community can be healthy and safe.

The Implications of Existence of "Multiple-Level Determinants" of Health and Health Behavior

The levels that determine public health and health behavior include the personal, institutional/organizational, environmental, and policy levels. Health behaviors rely on a complex interrelation of determinants at various levels. The health behaviors in a society are reflected by the interplay between contextual factors and people. The health of a community depends on the smallest indivisible unit, that is, an individual. The health of people relies on their context, and therefore, one cannot blame an individual for poor health or even credit them for the same.

Various multi-levels influence health. Populations have some controls over their health status, in collaborations with other levels. Population control of health depends on setting and their contributions. The programs can be developed to enhance both physical and social environments in the daily lives. A population that is educated, economically stable, and informed of the outbreaks and control measures have little risks exposures to diseases or any pandemic (Scutchfield & Keck, 2009).

Today, most interventions to aid public health protection against certain diseases are addressed by multiple-level determinants. The determinants include the individual patients, social and family supports, organizational setting, local community, and policy environments. For example, an improved health-related outcome against tuberculosis within a community relies on the interventions by all the above-mentioned levels. Global occurrence of tuberculosis can be prevented by taking various measures for its control. The control of the TB epidemic requires an ecological approach of both medical and public or social interventions. The interventions are set to address the underlying TB determinants. The first key area includes the immediate identification of the infected persons and placing them on the necessary treatment.

The community with a risk of tuberculosis also has a role to support the patients in the community and to be aware of the symptoms of the disease for others to take care. Also, other measures to ensure the safety of the public is to vaccinate the high-risk groups, maintain high standard diagnostic services, planning intervention workforce, and trace contacts to avoid the active disease progression and to ensure interventions. The following elements are checked in the individual patient; biological factors, risk status, comorbidities, psychological coping, and knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. The social support of the patients can be obtained from the friends and families. The organizational public health interventions occur through patient education and clinical decision support among others. The local community intervenes by the availability of local hospitals, medical care teams, and private and public community organizations that advocate for TB prevention (Scutchfield & Keck, 2009). The policies advocate for the existence of public health care facilities, TB prevention awareness programs, and community TB advocacy groups.

The epidemic-control measures that are recognized internationally to end the TB in the global platform include early diagnosis, treatment, scaled-up diagnosis, systematic screening, vaccination and preventive treatment for high-risk groups, and carrying out research and development (R&D) of new approaches of diagnosis, new drugs, and improved vaccines. The other very important multi-level determinant intervention aspect of TB is developing the supporting policies, standardized data collection, rational use of drugs, and monitoring and evaluating the intervention outcomes.

It is crucial to note that while the clinical approach to diseases is very important, a healthy population is a combined effort of the society. The method is referred to as public health practice. The approach considers a multifaceted system that works holistically to ensure a healthy community. The main aspects of public health are the promotion, prevention, and protection of the public. The multiple-level determinants in public health interventions are individuals, community, public policies, and private and public organizations.

Reference

Scutchfield, F. D., & Keck, W. (2009). Principles of public health practice. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar Cengage Learning.