Question

A variety of summary measures including morbidity, mortality, disability and associated costs are frequently used to assess public health. These summary measures are often used in combination, as one measure alone may not accurately reflect the true state of public health. While it is understood that a single summary measure is insufficient in describing the health of a population, there is also controversy as to which measures of public health best characterize the public’s health (Thacker, 2006). identify and describe the characteristics that you believe a public health summary measure should possess. How might these characteristics contribute to and improve our understanding of disease burden in the population?

Answer 1

Allocation of public health resources should be based, on objective assessments of health status, burden of disease, injury, and disability, their preventability, and related costs. We analyze traditional measures of the public’s health that address the burden of disease and disability and associated costs. Then the activities that are essential to protecting the public’s health whose impact is difficult to measure. Then the general characteristics of useful measures of the public’s health are considered. The measures of the public’s health is a critical step in targeting attention and resources to improve health, mounting health care costs, and declining quality of life that threatens the future.

The persisting inequities in health status, these demographic changes will have a dramatic impact on health. An older population will suffer from more chronic disease, the age prevalence of conditions remains stable. Similar projections have been made for obesity, diabetes, chronic lung disease, and other chronic conditions.

Longer life with no improvements in health will cause new health care technologies and increase spending, not only for direct medical care, but for long term care of older persons and those living with disabilities. These situation should be rebalanced with the investment portfolio to emphasize health protection and prevention of those conditions with high burden and cost is a logical strategy. Successful efforts require developing and validating better measures of the public’s health and associated costs to guide rational decisions about the allocation of limited resources.

Selected traditional measures of public health, including morbidity, mortality, and disability, and their related costs, as well as summary measures of burden and quality of life, which can be used to prioritize the conditions for attention new measures needed to assess the public’s health and monitor the effectiveness of public health programs and practice.

Strategic health planning can accelerate health development and the attainment of health goals or reduce the cost of reaching goals. Such planning must take into account the needs that the health system and the policy makers must be aware of the comparative burden of diseases and injuries and the risk factors that cause them, and how this burden is likely to change with the adoption of various policies and interventions. The only factors determining service provision, should be a critical component of the decision making and planning processes.

The issue is how to assess the comparative importance of risks to health and the outcomes in different demographic groups of the population. What is needed is a framework for integrating, validating, analyzing, and disseminating the fragmentary, and contradictory, information that is available on a population's health, with some understanding of how that population's health is changing, so that the information is more relevant for health policy and planning purposes.

The incorporation of data on nonfatal health outcomes into summary measures of population health, the development of methods for assessing the reliability of data and imputing missing data, and the use of a common metric to summarize the disease burden from diagnostic categories.

The major risk factors that cause those health outcomes. presents a simplified version of this framework and indicates the causal chain of events that matter for health outcomes, identifying the key components and determinants of health status that require quantification.

In order to recommend intervention packages at different stages of development, the estimates were combined with analyses of the cost effectiveness of interventions in different populations. Whereas earlier attempts to quantify global cause of death patterns were valuable initial contributions to building the evidence base for policy, they were largely restricted to broad cause of death groups, all infections and parasitic diseases combined, and avoided nonfatal health outcomes.

With appropriate methods, investigator commitment, and expert judgment, obtaining internally consistent estimates of the global descriptive epidemiology of major conditions is possible. To prepare internally consistent estimates of incidence, prevalence, duration, and mortality of the diseases and injuries under consideration, a mathematical model, was developed for the study to convert partial, data on disease and injury occurrence into a description of the basic epidemiological parameters in each region by age group.

Separate measures of survival among survivors, with useful inputs when formulating health policy, need to be combined to provide a single, holistic measure of overall population health.