What is public health? This question has no easy answer. Various definitions have arisen to try to clarify this notion. One of the major innovators in the conceptual development of public health was C. E. Winslow. According to Winslow, public health is the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, promoting health and physical and mental efficiency through organized community effort to:
1) clean up the environment, 2) control of communicable diseases, 3) health education, 4) the organization of medical and nursing services, and 5) the development of social mechanisms that ensure the individual and a community standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.
Perhaps more important to define the public health is to identify what it is. In this sense, it seems that the mission of public health is to meet society’s interests in ensuring the conditions that allow people to have health. The three fundamental missions of public health as defined by the Institute of Medicine were related to 10 key practices that should provide the public health and who were identified and cataloged by a working group established by the Public Health Practice Program Office of the CDC.
These definitions provide a structural framework that defines activities in public health:
A) To assess and monitor health: the objective was to determine the health status of communities and populations at risk to identify health problems and priorities. You have to proceed to the collection, collation, analysis and dissemination of information about the health of populations. The services to be provided by public health response to this mission are:
1. Assessing the health needs of the population.
2. Research on the emergence of problems and health risks.
3. Analysis of the determinants of health hazards identified.
B) Develop programs and public policies in collaboration with the community and the authorities need to design plans and programs for solving problems and health priorities identified at each level, local, regional and national levels. We must exercise responsibility for the public interest by developing a comprehensive set of public policies on health, promoting the use of scientific knowledge for decision making, encouraging community involvement and evaluating results. The services of public health in this area are:
4. Adoption of a role as mediator and spokesman.
5. Establishment of priorities among the needs identified.
6. Develop programs and plans to respond to those needs.
C) services ensure that all people have access to services that are appropriate and cost-effective services including health promotion and disease prevention, evaluating the effectiveness of those interventions, ensuring the implementation of the services are necessary for achieving the goals set in response to the needs revealed by stimulating the actions to be developed to regulate the launch or providing services directly. This would:
7. manage resources and develop an organizational structure.
8. Setting up the program.
9. evaluate programs and establish quality assurance systems and quality improvement.
10. Informing and educating the population.
