PU535 Public Health Biology Unit 3 Burden of Disease & Public Health Announcement Flashcards
How has public health shifted since the start of the 21st century?
The emphasis has shifted away from communicable diseases to a much broader agenda and a multidisciplinary focus that includes the prevention of chronic disease. Increased emphasis has also been made on the contribution of individual behavior and lifestyles to disease, with public health programs and strategies taking a population as well as an individual approach.
Within the social context of public health, where does the focus of health programming and policy development lay?
- Social patterning of health behaviors
- Psychosocial dynamics of deprivation and inequality
- Relationships between work and health (resilience and change)
- Social capital and social exclusion
- Ethnicity
- Disability, health, resistance, and identity
- Mass media
- Globalization
In the UK, why are public health initiatives are seen as disadvantaged by the public?
Because of its close association with the NHS, who focus on broader public health policies that tackle wider determinants of health requiring multisector and settings approaches.
Over the years, what environment that people experience almost everyday has shown increasing evidence on the maintenance of health?
Work settings
What does the demographic transition within globalization force changes of?
Changes of priority and practice as population structures and dependency ratios change.
More sensationalist and individualist approaches are needed for mass media presentations on public health.
Globalization also poses a direct challenge to public health systems that have traditionally concentrated efforts within state borders. There is a need for a paradigm shift
to one that focuses action beyond jurisdictional boundaries and nurtures inter agency
collaboration.
What understanding does a public health agency need in order to tackle and address inequalities, both regionally and globally?
Social class analysis remains the essential tool for public health practitioners.
A key point made is the difficulty in establishing the degree to which
inequalities in health between ethnic groups is due to structural differences in power or
barriers due to racism.
What type of approach is public health moving to?
A more health seeking rather than a disease-avoidance approach.
This move towards embracing a more salutogenic philosophy and
social model of health to inform action is associated with the new public health movement that arose in the later part of the twentieth century. The challenge will be to sustain
these more radical approaches that recognize the wider determinants of health.
How are lifestyle choices not in any genuine sense free choices?
There is no argument that lifestyle factors have an important influence on health, but many so-called lifestyle ‘choices’ are rooted in the broad social and economic structural contexts and personal
circumstances within which people live.
Without taking the effects of these structural contexts and personal circumstances into
consideration, lifestyle-focused health promotion can very easily become an individualistic
‘blame the victim’ exercise and produce less than desired health gains. Another example is
the still frequent privileging of biomedical ‘solutions’ over social pathways to health
advancement (e.g. in research funding, medical training, health hierarchies etc.).
What are two key appreciations that are essential in understanding population health?
The production of good and bad health involves many factors (multicausality)
The complex relationships between factors (interaction)
What are five of the most cited frameworks that are conceptual models of population health?
- Epidemiological Triad (triangle) model
- Health field model/twenty-first-century model
- Globalization and health framework
- WHO’s Comparative quantification of health risks framework
- Social determinants framework
What is the traditional model of disease causation in epidemiology, explaining the occurrence of disease as the result of interactions between three factors–agent, host, and environment?
- Epidemiological Triad (triangle) model
What model brings together what are termed global factors (community and social environment, physical environment, family and individual environment), the healthcare system and the notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary disease prevention?
- Health field model/twenty-first-century model
What framework encompasses both the indirect effects on health, operating through the national economy, household economies and health-related sectors such as water, sanitation and education, as well as more direct effects on population-level and individual risk factors for health and on the health care system?
- Globalization and health framework
What is the framework that demonstrates how social, economic, and political factors such as income, education, occupation, gender, race, and ethnicity influence a person’s socioeconomic position which, in turn, plays a role in determining health outcomes?
- Social determinants framework
What is an organizing framework that argues that the forces driving global health differentials can usefully be categorized into four levels which is underpinned by a fifth level–individual level health determinates?
Geographical scale-based organizing framework
