In a post-pandemic world, the term “public health” seems to be everywhere. Does the field cover simply mask mandates and vaccination rollouts, as we’ve come to know in today’s post-COVID society, or are there more considerations to be made? What even constitutes health that is public?
A Definition
Well, according to the CDC--the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention--public health involves not only protecting communities from health risks but also improving their conditions. Unlike traditional physicians in medicine, public health officials focus more on preventing injury to the population rather than treating it. While often this work involves (as the CDC’s name belies) controlling infectious diseases, public health occurs on many different levels.
Public health may involve countless different fields: aging, mental health, epigenetics--the study of how the environment affects genes--health equity and accessibility, disaster response, and addiction. Public health may even span to environmental health scientists, who serve the community by researching chemicals that are potentially hazardous and maintaining clean water, for instance.
At its core, public health operates through a few core avenues. First...
1. Education
Education is an extremely key factor in public health. If communities understand the threats they face, then they will be much more likely to avoid those health risks. Education allows public health officials to advise populations on safety and inform them of potentially harmful behaviors. For example, public health information helps dissuade vaccine hesitancy. Knowledge is most definitely power!
2. Policy
Next, policy. Sometimes, education about a risk is simply not enough. Public health officials often advise the process of developing policies to keep community hazards as low as possible. A major example of a public health policy are smoke-free policies enacted by certain areas to discourage smoking. Another example are policies as outlined by regulations like the Safe Drinking Water Act that ensure a city's water always meets a certain standard of cleanliness.
3. Services
In addition, public health can also help administer services. Like the mission of Vaccines4Good, this can look like aiding the rollout of free vaccinations to counter the spread of a disease like COVID-19. These services can also be as simple as monitoring population health in different areas.
4. Research
Finally, public health is all about research. While this research looks quite different from the stereotypical clinical lab research, public health focuses primarily on the social, economic, political, environmental, and genetic health factors that influence the population. In addition, public health emphasizes the disparate impacts of traditional medicine on marginalized populations.
So why is public health so important?
Whereas doctors and nurses respond to emergencies on the individual level, public health officials allow us to address pressing issues for the entire community. They are a crucial piece of society that has already increased life expectancy in the U.S. by around 30 years!
Additionally, a major goal of public health is to increase healthcare equity and accessibility. Public health strives to ensure that medical innovations and scientific solutions are truly available to everyone.
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