What is Public Health?

“Prevention is better than cure!”

 This ancient Arabic proverb contains a lot of wisdom for society today – expressing a “Public Health” message those many years ago!

Public Health focuses on protecting people’s health, promoting healthy lifestyles, preventing disease, thereby reducing disease, disability, injury, and premature death in Populations as a whole. Public Health identifies the population’s health needs, and provides solutions to address those needs.

Health Protection refers to actions that protect against harmful exposures at home, at work, and in society. Examples of this include ensuring the safety and quality of food, water, air and the general and work environments; preventing the transmission of infectious diseases; and managing outbreaks and the other incidents which threaten the health of the population.

Health Promotion refers to the “process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.” It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions.

Prevention refers to interventions that individuals and communities can take to reduce the risk of disease, injuries, disability or premature death. It understands that in this world, actions have consequences. For example, if society provides clean water to its population, the number of children who die from diarrhea will decrease; or if a law is enforced to restrict smoking in public places, it leads to less population exposure to smoke, and consequently, less cancer and heart disease. Public Health identifies hazards through research activities, providing a sufficient level of evidence for precaution against negative health outcomes in the population.

Public Health, then, aims to provide the conditions in which people can be healthy. The main focus is on entire populations and the environment, not on individual patients or diseases.

How do Public Health and Medicine Differ?

Public Health complements medical care . . . But how do they differ?
Let’s take the example of diabetes. Medical care for diabetes is delivered in hospitals and clinics, and involves prescribing diabetes medications and treating its complications (eye disease, heart attacks, or kidney disease, for example). The Public Health view, on the other hand, asks the question, "Where did these diabetes patients come from, and why did they get diabetes in the first place?"

The answer is that people with diabetes come from a community. Diabetes results from what is happening in the community: homes, work-places, and leisure spaces.

Public Health thinks about diabetes at its source: the things in the community that are leading to people becoming overweight. This is an increasing problem in adults in Kuwait, but is especially a concern among the children.

Public Health would approach this problem first by investigating why so many young children are becoming obese in Kuwait these days. There are many reasons, but one could be that parents or grandparents may view a heavier weight as healthy. Another reason could be that some people may view exercise as difficult, unappealing, not easily available, or not needed. Research is needed to identify and find ways to decrease these “causes of the causes” of diabetes.

Public Health not only identifies the roots of the problem, but then designs programs and interventions to address those issues.

It is the responsibility of Public Health to intervene in the community to reduce such risky behaviors for disease. It is only by changing what is happening in the community that can we slow the epidemic of diabetes in Kuwait!