Question

• What is the dual focus of public health as its mandate for service and responsibilities?
• What are the major goals for public health and how have these goals evolved to what they represent today?

Answer 1

Solution -

The dual focus of Public Health as a mandate with the perspective of services and responsibility is as follows -

Services - Public health organizations provide adequate public health infrastructure to the people, promote healthy behavior, provide a mechanism for prevention of spreading of diseases and environmental hazards and providing a mechanism for emergencies.

Responsibility - Public health as responsibility is oriented towards spreading awareness regarding certain health hazards and ways to prevent certain health issues. The public health organizations also provide communication on certain health checkup camps that are set up for promoting awareness on certain health issues. Public health as a responsibility also indulges into research to understand the root cause of certain health problems and provide awareness on their findings

Hence, in a nutshell, public health as a service looks at providing a certain mechanism for promoting health and with the perspective of responsible public health looks at providing awareness for promoting a healthy community.

The goals and objectives of public health are primarily concentrated towards promoting the improvement of the general health of the society, prevention of diseases and assisting people to make informed choices about health issues. These are the broad categories of the goals and objectives and they have not changed over time but what has undergone a change is that today public health organizations are looking to provide early warning mechanism for certain health hazards and provide research mechanism for generating valuable knowledge on certain problems. The other common objectives are as follows -

1. Leading health programs

2. Spreading awareness about General Health

3. Setting up health camps to promote general well being

4. Setting up mechanism to provide services to all people without any discrimination

5. Providing assistance in monitoring investigating health hazards of a community

Today with the changing times public health has set up a function of surveillance where certain public health issues are investigated and research is carried out to find out the core reasons and its ways of prevention. The suite of services that public health today provides is far more than what was being looked at as an objective of public health earlier. In the past epidemics were looked at as a reason for having public health organizations but today with technology and globalization, public health is considered more for the well being of the society as a whole and providing equity for the community in the services related to health. Public Health 2.0 is a movement that is solely based on the grounds to promote accessibility of health services to the general public and make it more user-driven. Hence the social media and search engines are being used to spread awareness on public health and with a mechanism like crowdsourcing Information sharing and user-centered designs people have become more drawn towards the issues of public health.