What are the unique contributions of public health practice to improving population health? In your response, you may wish to consider the following: How does the public health approach differ from a medical approach? What is its unique focus? What does public health practice consist of? What is the importance of the ecological perspective? How would you explain the goal of public health to a layperson? Please incorporate a specific example into your response that supports or illustrates your answer. What are the implications of there being “multiple-level determinants” of health and health behavior? In your response, you may wish to consider the following: What are “levels”? How are health and health behavior impacted by multi-level determinants? Given that there are multi-level influences on health, how much control do populations have over their health status? What kinds of interventions best address multiple-level determinants? Please incorporate examples of one of the following health behaviors/outcomes throughout your response to illustrate your understanding of the concept of multi-level determinants: Use of breast cancer screening, Incidence of food-borne illness, Excessive alcohol use

 

Public Health Practice

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Public Health Practice

Public health practice is strategically viewed as a concentration that is typically preferred by various professionals including the nurses, physicians, social workers, and nutritionists who operate in any public health setting. Public health practice intends to encourage proper health conditions and quality of life through preventing and controlling ailments, any form of injury, and disability. Some differences occur between public health approach and medical approach since public health strategically deals with health from a population view while the medical procedure concentrates on health issues from an individual perspective. Typically, in the medical method, the patient is the person while in public health the patient consists of the whole society (Berg, Khoury, & Evans, 2011). Moreover, in medical approach, the medical professionals’ diagnoses individual’s health issues through listening to him or her talk about their symptoms and engaging in the necessary medical test. In public health approach, the professionals diagnose society health issues through scientific research and ailment surveillance systems. The public health officials also apply two significant indicators which are disease incidence and disease prevalence in the measurement of population health.

Public health is considered as the science and art of coming up with a healthy society through the education process, various research and promotion of healthy living conditions. Public health typically concentrates on health advancement and disease prevention which varies from the medical approach that focuses mainly upon diagnosing and treating diseases and conditions after they occur. Consequently, public health practice is concerned with safeguarding the health of the whole populations without any form of discrimination as these communities can be as small as a neighborhood or as large as that of a country (Nutbeam, Harris, & Wise, 2010). Other unique concerns of public health are to build capacity in individuals and societies with the aim of enhancing health conditions, providing disease surveillance, and control.

Public health practice consists of different issues such as the use of public health scholarship, knowledge and the required skills that are essential in any public health practice setting through working together with state institutions, policymakers, community and advocacy institutions, and health care delivery systems. It also engages research and technical help when the professionals get to connect with practitioners in bringing science and practice techniques to the process of evaluating issues, coming up with interventions, and monitoring implementation and scrutiny of the responses. Moreover, public health practice comprises of enhancing scholarship through the act of publication, teaching, communication practices that convey the skills and equipment required in translating research into practical applications.

Ecological perspective typically applies an environmental concept from biology as a symbol with which it evaluates the reciprocity that exists between a person and his or her surroundings. People operating in the field of social psychology should use various strategies and perspectives in gaining a holistic knowledge of the society they are working under. The ecological perspective strategically allows the social psychologist to evaluate the complicated methods of various regions of the culture that affect one another (Nutbeam, Harris, & Wise, 2010). Getting to know the interdependence that every system has and the manner in which each part of the system affects the other typically serves as a guiding factor in determining practices and interventions that are likely to be used in helping the society. Regarding the goals of public health, a layperson should understand that these are factors that make a public health measure success or a failure, as well as explaining the things to consider while evaluating the merits of challenging public health proposals.

 

Multi-level Determinants

Multi-level evaluation typically tries to highlight people’s outcomes regarding both environmental and individual variables. It is essential to understand that the perspective of a multi-level analysis puts into consideration the significance of both individual and surrounding variable in knowing the health behaviors and results at the degree of the indivisible unit. A majority of factors typically combines to affect the health conditions of various people and communities (Marchand et al. 2015). Whether individuals are healthy or not, it is evaluated by their mode of living and surrounding. Health behaviors which at times referred to as health-related characters are those actions practiced by various people that typically have an impact on their health or the nature of their moral behaviors. These activities are likely to be intentional or unintentional and can strategically lead to promotion or detraction from the health of the person or other people. One of the actions that can be grouped as health behaviors may include excessive alcohol consumption and to a higher level, factors such as the environment, places people stays, genetics, and level of income, and the relationship that exists between friends and families will affect the level of alcohol consumption.

The income and social status are typically associated with better health where one will lower the rate of alcohol consumption as one will moderate how he or she consumes alcoholic substances. Population, on the other hand, can have control over health status of an individual; as observed by Pornet et al. (2010), a person threat of ailment cannot be viewed in seclusion from the illness hazard for the population to which he or she belongs. Therefore, a person living in the United States is more prone to die too early from excessive alcohol consumption than an individual staying in Japan. This is because the inhabitant’s distribution of alcohol consumption in the United States in total is more than the circulation in Japan. Therefore, using population perspective as a health measure means asking the reason as to why a given population has the actual composition of a given risk. Moreover, in a majority of cases, a minor percentage of any given community is at the limits of high or low risk; however, many people will typically find themselves in the middle of the distribution of health risk. Pornet et al. (2010), explains that being exposed to a large number of people to a threat such excessive consumption of alcohol can typically result in an absolute number cases of the same status.

The public and physical surrounding have ever since been highlighted as significant indicators of health in various places; thus, individuals living in urban areas are more exposed to several health problems that are associated with their health effects (Marchand et al. 2015). Consequently, the millennium expansion goals have typically outlined the universal condition of poverty and the link that exists amid health and communal status and provides a chance to move beyond constricted sections interventions. Regarding the complexity of wellbeing, poverty, and ecological issues in towns, it is, therefore, necessary that enhancement in health and wellbeing equity not only needs alterations in the physical and public environment of towns but also requires an incorporated mechanism that considers the broader socioeconomic and background issues affecting health status. Moreover, both the political and authorized institutions of the policy-making procedure are also influential in determining the public and international health as an outcome of the duties it has in coming up with potentiality in participation and empowerment.

 

References

Berg, J. S., Khoury, M. J., & Evans, J. P. (2011). Deploying whole genome sequencing in clinical practice and public health: meeting the challenge one bin at a time. Genetics in Medicine13(6), 499.

Marchand, A., Durand, P., Haines, V., & Harvey, S. (2015). The multilevel determinants of workers’ mental health: results from the SALVEO study. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology50(3), 445-459.

Nutbeam, D., Harris, E., & Wise, W. (2010). Theory in a nutshell: a practical guide to health promotion theories. McGraw-Hill.

Pornet, C., Dejardin, O., Morlais, F., Bouvier, V., & Launoy, G. (2010). Socioeconomic determinants for compliance to colorectal cancer screening. A multilevel analysis. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health64(4), 318-324.

 

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