The public health is a “combination of science, skills and beliefs that are directed toward the maintenance and improvement of the health of individuals and populations.” (Last 1995) If you’ve ever received a vaccination, assumed your tap water was safe, attended a birth or funeral, been screened for tuberculosis or HIV, eaten in restaurants inspected for food safety or visited a doctor for your annual checkup, you have benefitted from the efforts of people in the field of public health.
While medicine focuses on treating the sick, public health deals with preventing disease, illness and injury across a community, a state or even a globe. Public health is a collaborative social effort to promote health and prevent diseases—both communicable and non-communicable—and disability that involves population surveillance, regulation of the determinants of health such as sanitation and hygiene, and the delivery of key healthcare services with an emphasis on prevention.
Public health practitioners, whether in the US or elsewhere, are increasingly concerned with the underlying social and economic conditions that affect health. A growing recognition that health inequality reflects the wider distribution of resources in society—that is, class, race, education, income, regional location and social connections—has given rise to ‘new public health’ themes which seek to address the determinants of health at a community level, and which have had a significant influence on medical research and clinical practice. This has also impacted the design and use of evidence-based policies.
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