Decoding and Delivering Public Health

Abstract

Health is an essential requirement for the development and welfare of individuals as well as populations. Health is often viewed as a domain distinctively divided into two separate worlds: clinical medicine and public health. Fundamentally, clinical medicine operates with the individual as the unit of observation and intervention, while public health has the population as the unit of study and service. While the health system is charged with the prime responsibility for delivering care, it is also necessary to recognise and respect the role of the community, not merely as a beneficiary but as an active contributor to agenda-setting, implementation and monitoring. To ensure that a wide range of health services reach all entitled persons in the population, we need to design and deliver a strong Universal Health Coverage programme, which is best delivered when public financing accounts for a major portion of the health expenditure. Since health is profoundly influenced by social, economic, environmental and commercial determinants, it is imperative that these determinants are shaped to enable, rather than erode, health. Public health has emerged from the communion of medicine and social sciences. It is now a multi-disciplinary confluence of life sciences, quantitative sciences, social sciences and management sciences. Public health research must be multi-disciplinary, to assist the development and delivery of enlightened public policy through multi-sectoral pathways.