How is public health defined and who engages in this practice? How do we weigh individual rights against public health? Compare and contrast elements of health insurance, and give an example of containing health care costs and improving health care quality to development and help strengthen the character of our community. And how do you think the Affordable Care Act has improved public health?
A health system, also sometimes referred to as health care system or as healthcare system, is the organization of people, institutions, and resources that deliver health care services to meet the health needs of target populations. There is a wide variety of health systems around the world, with as many histories and organizational structures as there are nations. Implicitly, nations must design and develop health systems in accordance with their needs and resources, although common elements in virtually all health systems are primary healthcare and public health measures.
Public health is the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities. This work is achieved by promoting healthy lifestyles, researching disease and injury prevention, and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases.
Overall, public health is concerned with protecting the health of entire populations. These populations can be as small as a local neighborhood, or as big as an entire country or region of the world.
Public health professionals try to prevent problems from happening or recurring through implementing educational programs, recommending policies, administering services and conducting research—in contrast to clinical professionals like doctors and nurses, who focus primarily on treating individuals after they become sick or injured. Public health also works to limit health disparities. A large part of public health is promoting healthcare equity, quality and accessibility.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the nation’s leading public health agency, dedicated to saving lives and protecting the health of Americans. CDC keeps America secure by controlling disease outbreaks; making sure food and water are safe; helping people avoid leading causes of death such as heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes; and working globally to reduce threats to the nation’s health. When a national health security threat appears, CDC may not know right away why or how many people are affected, but the agency has world-class expertise to find out what is making people sick and what to do about it.
DC is ready 24/7 to respond to any natural or manmade event. By connecting state and local health departments across the nation, CDC can discover patterns of disease and respond when needed. CDC monitors health, informs decision-makers, and provides people with information so they can take responsibility for their own health. CDC also trains and guides state and local public health laboratory partners to ensure that labs can safely detect and respond to dangerous health threats.
CDC works to strengthen local and state public health departments and promote proven health programs. Headquartered in Atlanta, CDC has a staff of more than 14,000 employees in nearly 170 occupations who work in all 50 states and more than 50 countries.
Good health may be the most valued attribute of life. Daily, we express our concern for others by inquiring about their health and wishing them well. Material concerns are overshadowed when our own health is threatened; good health is recognized as essential for the pursuit of happiness.
Good health is as difficult to define as it is important. It means different things to different people. Health is influenced by many factors, including the genes we inherit, the environment into which we are born, and our own behavior.
The influence of health care is variable. In some cases, it is essential and its effect in preserving or restoring health is dramatic. In others, it has a marginal impact, at least on those attributes of life and health that can be objectively measured. Although health cannot be bought and sold, health care can be and is, with expenditures that are far greater in the United States than in other industrialized nations.
Personally, people in the United States want health care that will maximize their health potential and meet their health goals. Collectively, they want to ensure equitable access to essential health services. These wants, together with the uncertainty about the effectiveness of component health services in preserving or improving health, provide the context for rapidly increasing health care costs and unexplained variations in use of services by different providers for seemingly similar patients.
Defining health is difficult because of differences in what may be valued and attainable and because of the sometimes tenuous relationship between health services and health outcomes. These are not theoretical issues for those responsible for operating a program to assure quality health care. The process involves eliciting and balancing value judgments, often when legitimate interests are in conflict. Responsibilities are often shared and are therefore ambiguous. Even when the decisions are sound and the appropriate services are delivered with technical proficiency, poor outcomes can occur. Conversely, bad decisions or inept care will not always be followed by poor outcomes. The quality of care cannot necessarily be judged by the outcome for an individual, so accountability is further diffused. These issues must be understood in defining quality health care and designing programs and systems to assure it.
In contrast to other common definitions that refer to medical or patient care our definition of quality refers to health services. Health care implies a broad set of services, including acute, chronic, preventive, restorative, and rehabilitative care, which are delivered in many different settings by many different health care providers. This broad dimension is particularly important for the elderly, who often receive a wide range of services from different sources. There is great potential for fragmentation of care unless programs and resources are available and dedicated to assure coordination and continuity. The need for attention to continuity has been greatly heightened by the shifts in settings of care resulting from the Prospective Payment System (PPS) and other cost-containment policies.
Our definition identifies both individuals (but not just “patients”) and populations for three reasons. First, even though traditionally quality assurance has focused on the technical care rendered to individuals (for instance, in medical record review), we believe advances must be made in population-based measures. This is particularly important for assessments of overuse of certain services and of underuse that results from lack of access to the health care system or from less than adequate care for those who do have access to the system. Second, we believe that only by emphasizing both individuals and populations can we underscore the importance of identifying determinants of health and illness. Third, we have described some strategies for assessing and assuring quality of care that can be used more widely than in a single public program.
Neither a definition of quality of care nor a strategy for quality assurance is particularly useful outside a context. We take the appropriate context to have three major components: (1) the health status of the citizenry, both individually and collectively; (2) the health care system that attempts to meet the needs of that citizenry; and (3) the major policy issues that must be taken into account as one attempts to put a quality assurance program into place.
The modern American health care system has evolved through several important periods. Beginning with the period of development of the first hospitals and followed with the period establishing the introduction of the scientific method into medicine, the evolution has continued into a current period that is characterized by acknowledgment of limited resources, reorganization of methods for financing and delivery of care, and a greater examination of the respective roles and responsibilities of patients, providers, and society in the protection of health and well-being.
Growth in physician manpower has been uneven over at least the last two decades as a result partly of shifting levels of financing for undergraduate medical education and partly of inconsistent projections of the country's need for physicians. On the surface the number of physicians available to serve the elderly appears to be adequate. However, the relative proportions of primary care physicians and specialists is markedly skewed toward specialists, and some experts believe that many physicians lack an adequate appreciation of the complexities of caring for elderly patients. In addition, some observers fear that present (or at least future) levels of Medicare reimbursement will induce some physicians to restrict their Medicare practices and thus reduce the pool of physicians available to provide care to the growing elderly population. Finally, some experts argue that greater numbers of physicians (by themselves) may not improve quality; instead, more benefit might be expected from improving the services that physicians supply.
The elderly are usually quite satisfied with their own medical care and the health care providers with whom they interact, although they may express dissatisfaction about access or financial barriers to care. Despite this positive view, a large body of literature documents specific areas of deficiencies in quality in all parts of the health sector—what we have called the burden of harm of quality problems. Some of these deficiencies relate to poor technical and interpersonal skills or judgment in the delivery of appropriate services, some to the overuse of unnecessary and inappropriate services, and some to underuse of needed services by those receiving some care and by those having difficulty obtaining access to the health care system.
Both the types of quality problems and the level of quality may vary considerably across geographic areas, among beneficiaries, and among individual and institutional health care providers. The use of health care services varies greatly even across small geographic areas of the country in ways for which we cannot fully account. The effectiveness and the outcomes of that care may also vary greatly.
Because several factors and parties contribute to health care, it is not surprising to find countervailing forces at work within the environment in which health care is delivered. The health of individuals has important implications for the health of the community; in some circumstances the natural balancing of these countervailing forces has not brought the level of health care desired. Thus, government bodies have assumed some responsibility to monitor the quality of health care and to direct or control some of the forces thought to influence the quality of health care.
Ours is a society that values individual choice, rests its economy on capitalistic principles of competition, uses regulatory methods to place basic (or entry) controls on the health care industry, supports a health delivery system that is decentralized, pluralistic, and fragmented, and uses the courts to resolve both the most trivial and the most complex of social and political issues. It is thus not surprising that patients resort to private legal means, largely that of malpractice suits, when they believe that quality of care has fallen demonstrably below acceptable levels.
How is public health defined and who engages in this practice? How do we weigh individual...
Compare/contrast the use of healthcare informatics for individual patient care and for public/community health care. How are technology tools used in similar or different ways, based on the audience? Provide an example of how a specific technology tool can be used to educate an individual patient vs. how it would be used to educate the public.
Community Health Evaluation Private and Public Health are working together through many program initiatives to promote cost-effective, quality, and compassionate patient care and population health. Under the Affordable Care Act (2010), and the patient-centered medical home model (PCMH) and programs such as the All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), how are health professionals in both private and public health working together to meet the critical needs of the elderly populations? See: Medicaid. (2018) PACE and CMS. (2011) Patient-Centered Medical Home Recognition...
We are all challenged to advance our professional practice from both an individual and a collective perspective. Consider your path to further career development. How does this support the IOM's statement that nurses should: work to the full extent of their education, be partners in the redesign of the health care system, promote Improved data collection methods and information infrastructure, and actively pursue life-long learning?
Public Health question, ASAP please Compare and Contrast the biological framework and the socio-ecological framework for public health. Select a single disease/risk factor that would best be approached from and biological framework, and another that would best be approached from a socio-ecological framework. Justify your answer. Select one disease and a single risk factor. Describe one current way in which public health is addressing that risk factor. explain the theoretical framework that is used to justify th public health intervention...
Population-based public health is changing each day. How do these changes impact your future practice as a dental hygienist and how can the science of epidemiology assist our public and private dental hygiene practices and/or advocation for oral health?
Public health class question, ASAP please and need to be detail Thank you so much!!! 1. Compare and Contrast the biological framework and the socio-ecological framework for public health. Select a single disease/risk factor that would best be approached from and biological framework, and another that would best be approached from a socio-ecological framework. Justify your answer. 2.Select one disease and a single risk factor. Describe one current way in which public health is addressing that risk factor. explain the...
Ethically, health-care providers should refuse all patients that do not have the ability to pay. refuse patients when the practice is already oversubscribed. only refuse patients when the provider has announced his or her retirement. refer all low-income patients to a charitable organization instead of providing any health care to these patients. It is never acceptable to withhold information from patients for fear they will refuse treatment. True False Knowledge that, if revealed, would harm not only the client but...
Identify and describe the three guiding principles of public health nursing practice? How do they impact the role of nursing? (Essay question).
The Impact of Personal Health Records Objective Explain how personal health records impact individual health Discussion Overview This discussion forum explores how personal health records impact individual health. Step 1: Read the scenario. Cindy is a 57-year-old single female who works as a graphic designer. She describes herself as shy and reserved. She weighs 358 lb and is 5' 8" tall. She has recently lost her mother and is greatly concerned about improving her own health. She has been diagnosed...
Health as a Human Right Article 25 of the 1948 UDHR and the Constitution of WHO are examples of positive expressions of health as a human right. Using the online Library or the Internet, search for "health as a human right, a perspective from the WHO," put forth in the UDHR. Conduct a research on this topic. Your research should include key features of the decisions, investigations, and laws you analyzed during the research. Your research should also include answers...