Have you ever thought about what public health means to you?
What is public health?
This question is known to stump people. Normally, we have an intuition concerning our own personal health, but what about when talking about the health of a community? How about when we want to move beyond our own individual health, and upstream to the things that affect our individual health?
There is, of course, a definition provided in the Dictionary of Epidemiology, and as a testament to the complex nature of what public health is, it is lengthy:
“PUBLIC HEALTH Like most sculptures, symphonies, and other works of art, certain important things in live have several dimensions. The definition of public health has four dimensions. Public Health is:
The health of a whole society. It can be measured and assessed through quantitative and qualitative indicators and analytic processes.
The specific policies, services, programs and other essential efforts agreed (ideally, and often, democratically), organized, structured, financed, monitored, and evaluated by society to collectively protect, promote, and restore the people’s health and its determinants.
The institutions, public and private organizations – including private and public companies–, and other citizens organizations, that plan, develop, fund, and implement such efforts, and which are thus an integral part of local, national, regional, and global public health systems.
The scientific disciplines and professions, knowledge, methods, art, and craft essential to positively influence health determinants, and thus prevent disease and disability, prolong life, and promote health through the organized and collective efforts of society.
Public health takes care daily of what we breathe, drink, and eat, how we work, move, and live together. Economic, environmental, social, educational, occupational, medical, and other policies intertwined with public health change with changing social values and networks, policies and technologies; yet, the goals – diverse as they are in democratic societies–remain the same: to reduce the amount of health-related suffering, disease, disability, and premature death in the population, Public health is a system of professions and scientific disciplines, social organizations and institutions, values, and actions.”
That definition is a lot to read. I’ve been asked to describe public health (even as part of the oral exam for my MPH), and I don’t think I’ve ever personally used that many words. However, it also isn’t helpful to simply tell people that public health is simply… complicated.
For myself, I see those in Public Health as highly trained experts and specialists, that have made it their goal to work in and with communities, to work with data, discovering patterns and problems, and who genuinely care about the communities they serve. For example, I currently work with a professor to provide better advance warning for infectious disease when increases of infectious pathogens are found in wastewater. We have sites all over the state in which we can look for signs of many different diseases.
Public health is designed to prevent each of us from getting sick or injured in the first place. Clean air, pure water, safe neighborhoods, and more–it’s the mission of public health to make sure our cities, communities, and country have what we need to stay healthy. Continuing to use my current work as an example, I hope that the research I provide will help our hospitals better prepare for outbreaks, and give our health departments “heads ups” that are useful for their planning and response. That way, we know better how to respond to some of the diseases that have been showing up recently, like COVID-19, monkeypox, or the flu.
In the U.S., we spend a lot of time and money on healthcare, but we aren’t getting healthier or living longer. This is generally because we wait until someone becomes sick to treat them; we aren’t proactive about things that will prevent illness or injury. We also have a hard time making sure that our hospitals are financially sustainable (well, at least without charging a lot of money from people who are already dealing with being sick or hurt, or may not realistically have a choice). In order to accomplish this, I think we really need more than to rely on physicians to treat problems after they happen. We need to invest in public health and prevention. That’s why I’m glad that for my part, I can provide one avenue to do that. I can help guide vaccination strategies, suggest public health interventions and how to best use them, help hospitals to not be overburdened by cases (or to over-prepare for cases and spend money unecessarily). Last but not least, this information could be available so that you can make a better informed decision about the risks you take.
Even just using my work as an example, we can see that public health is complex; I use data from both the state health department, the university and state water survey, and the goal is to provide information for hospitals, for government agencies, and for everyone in general who wants to make a safe decision about their health, or their potential to spread disease to others. I think this makes sense because overall, public health experts bring together everyone who has a role to play in their community’s health – schools, businesses, government agencies, and others – to stop health threats before they start.
Hopefully, this will help illustrate what public health is if you hadn’t thought about it before. It’s a small blog, compared to the entirety of public health, and I see it very much as an epidemiologist does. It also feels a bit self-centered to use my work as an example, but I wouldn’t want to talk about colleagues that didn’t agree to their work being put online. If you know someone who works in public health, and you haven’t asked them about what they do – who they are as a public health practitioner, what their goals are in public health, what sort of issues they want to solve, or how they can solve them with the help of others – I am sure that they would love to tell you their story. Everyone I have met in public health cares very much about what they do and who they serve.