Why I like public Health
There are two key values that I think encapsulate why I love public health, and why I want to introduce you to those involved in it’s practice.
The first value I think of when I think of public health is holistic.
Where for example a Doctor may warn their patient to stop smoking, as it is worsening their asthma (Polosa, R., & Thomson, N. C. 2013), a public health professional would examine that patients data and those like them to form a more detailed picture of why their smoking and how to help them stop.
For instance, they may run targeted promotion material warning smokers who have asthma of their risk profile for continued smoking, they could place restrictions on cigarette sellers, making it easier for people with a cigarette addiction to avoid buying them.
Ok that sounds good, but how do we determine which interventions to put in place to create the outcome we want. Well that brings us to the second reason I love public health; data. A 2014 study in South Australia (Hahn, L., Rigby, A., & Galletly, C. 2014) found that approximately 74% of men and 71% of women with a psychotic disorder in northern Adelaide were smokers. The study does the service of contextualizing this for us, listing the percentage of smokers in the general population as being around 23% for men and 19% for women (which the study has gathered from Census information) meaning you’re 51% more likely to smoke as a man living with a psychotic disorder and 52% as a women.
So now we have a choice, we can target a subgroup or go broad. The benefit of targeting a subgroup is the effect size at an individual level can be larger and the change can bring about greater health equity across the overall population. The benefit of a broad scale intervention is a small change across a larger group can often have a more substantial overall economic and social effect.
Hopefully now you are starting to understand what Public Health means and why I like it, if you are I hope you’ll stick around as I introduce you to some of the people in Public Health to paint you a more detailed picture of the industry than I can do alone.
References
Hahn, L., Rigby, A., & Galletly, C. (2014). Determinants of high rates of smoking among people with psychosis living in a socially disadvantaged region in South Australia. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 48(1), 70–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004867413491158
Polosa, R., & Thomson, N. C. (2013). Smoking and asthma: dangerous liaisons. The European Respiratory Journal, 41(3), 716–726. https://doi.org/10.1183/09031936.00073312
