UGANDA MARTRYS UNIVERSITY

BACHELOR OF LAWS

NAMES; NANNYONGA OLGA

MENYA ASHRAF

ACHIENGE KELLY

QUESTION; Explain the essential public health services

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.

The Essential Public Health Services provide a framework for public health to protect and
promote the health of all people in all communities. To achieve equity, the Essential Public
Health Services actively promote policies, systems, and overall community conditions that
enable optimal health for all and seek to remove systemic and structural barriers that have
resulted in health inequities. Such barriers include poverty, racism, gender discrimination,
ableism, and other forms of oppression. Everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to
achieve optimal health and well-being.

Public health services may go unnoticed within a community because they are often (but not
always) preventive versus reactive.  For example, which community service are you more likely
to notice - an environmental health specialist inspecting the safety of a local university’s food
service establishments, or a fire truck speeding down the street with its lights and sirens on?

The Essential Public Health Services

1. Monitor health status to identify and solve community health problems

Public or population health monitoring is the regular collection of data on relevant

components of health and its determinants in the population or in samples thereof, aimed at
informing the public health policy process. Health components are considered to be
       
relevant if they cover issues of major public health importance, in terms of numbers and
trends, geographic spread, costs and health impact. There should also be coherence
between the components, i.e. health issues and their determinants, in terms of our understanding
of the mechanisms of health and disease.
There are systems all over the world to help sound alarms if things are amiss. While traditionally
they have relied heavily on things like reporting by medical practitioners, conducting surveys, or
testing lab samples, the internet has provided new ways to track epidemics in the early stages, or
even before they begin. A new field called digital disease detection has emerged to help public
health professionals and researchers spot outbreaks quickly by tracking key phrases on social
media or combing online news reports. These systems don't just look for infectious diseases.
Monitoring the health status of a community means also looking at things like injuries, chronic
diseases, and birth outcomes to see what trends if any exist.
Public health monitoring is useless without public health reporting. The major aims of public
health reporting are to communicate the state of health of a population to ‘all who need to know’
and to support the preparatory as well as evaluative phases of health policy making and health
care planning. Therefore, without reporting, public health monitoring cannot adequately
influence the policy process. The reporting function of public health monitoring can take many
forms, e.g. reports, brochures and articles. More recently also websites and presentations in
various other media, such as dedicated newspapers or films on the internet. Policy briefs and
policy dialogues are other important instruments for health reporting. Ideally these information
products do not only contain data, but also explanatory texts and links to research results, sources
of expertise and policy documents.

2. Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community

Once alarms have been raised, public health officials then work to figure out who is most
impacted and why. A whole scientific field is actually dedicated to investigating these health
trends. It's called epidemiology. Epidemiologists collect and analyze data to figure out how
diseases or health conditions are distributed in a given population, what key factors those cases
have in common, and most importantly how that information could be applied to prevent future
cases. When there's a salmonella outbreak, epidemiologists are the ones talking to those who got
sick, collecting information on what they ate, and pinpointing what food is the likely culprit so
that it can be pulled from the shelves.

3. Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues

Once public health professionals know what's going on, who it's impacting, and if possible how
to prevent it, they then spread the word to the population at large. One of the most successful
examples of this essential service in action was the Back to Sleep campaign. When
epidemiologists around the world started to identify sleep position as a risk factor for sudden
infant death syndrome, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other health officials in the
United States launched an educational campaign urging parents to place their babies down to
sleep on their backs, rather than on their stomachs or sides. Pediatricians talked about it with
their patients' families, pamphlets were passed out, and experts went on television to spread the
word.

4. Mobilize community partnerships identify and solve health problems

Rarely is disease prevention and health promotion done by a single entity in a vacuum. Public

health relies on the cooperation and support of a wide variety of stakeholders to investigate,
resolve, and prevent health issues. That includes individuals and organizations who may not be
involved in health directly, but whose support is crucial to gathering accurate information and
empowering individuals to adopt certain behavior changes.
For example, many public health initiatives have turned to local groups and individuals to help
combat HIV in marginalized populations. Instead of using authority figures to disseminate key
information, programs work within peer networks to reach those most at risk for infection. After
all, who better to help influence positive change in a community than the people who are already
a part of it?

5. Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts

Some of the greatest public health achievements of the past century were not actually due to one-
on-one education or small, local efforts. They were a result of policy changes. Workplace safety
guidelines, seat belt laws, and minimum quality standards for drinking water, for example, all led
to significant improvements to our health and safety.

School immunization requirements, for example, made big strides in increasing vaccination rates
and, in turn, combatting vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and chickenpox. Not only did
requirements work to protect individual children, but the resulting high immunization rates made
it harder for diseases to circulate a process known as herd immunity thus helping to protect an
even greater number of people in the community.

6. Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety

Health codes help prevent food-borne illness by requiring restaurants to adhere to certain
standards, but would they be as effective if health officials never came out to inspect the
kitchens? The same can be said for pharmaceuticals. Inspections of manufacturing facilities by
the Food and Drug Administration help minimize the risk that medical products become
contaminated. Policies can lead to population-level health improvements, but only if they are
enforced.

7. Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care
when otherwise unavailable

Health care in the United States is a fragmented and highly complicated system. Whether or not
you are able to see a doctor when you need to can vary based on a wide range of factors,
including your age, location, financial situation, health condition, and employment status. Public
health agencies help ensure some of the most vulnerable populations in a community are able to
access health care and access doesn't just mean getting in to see a doctor. It can also mean having
transportation to and from medical services, affordability of the care provided, and culturally
appropriate translation of materials.

One of the biggest ways public health departments help link people to services is through public
health centers. While often these centers provide direct medical care for low-income and
uninsured individuals, they also often provide things like health education, counseling, and
referral services. For example, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants,
and Children commonly called WIC is often run by local health departments in an effort to
ensure that all kids regardless of income have access to good nutrition in the first few years of
life.
8. Assure a competent public and personal healthcare workforce

Medicine is always changing to adapt to the latest research and available technologies. That's
why medical professionals in the United States are required to take classes to stay up-to-date.
Public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as local
health departments, collaborate with medical associations to offer continuing education classes
on a wide range of topics, including on things like bioterrorism and emergency preparedness yes,
even responding to natural disasters falls under public health, too.

9. Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based health

services

As effective as public health efforts have been to save lives and improve the health of
communities, there is always more that could be done. Health initiatives are under near-constant
monitoring and evaluation to verify they actually work, and programs that require funding are
also assessed to ensure that resources are being used efficiently and effectively.

To do this, agencies look at a wide range of factors and involve a host of different specialties.
Health economists, for example, can help estimate the cost-effectiveness of a given policy
change. Epidemiologists look at disease trends among participants of a particular health initiative
to see if they've improved. Biostatisticians analyze data from surveys and medical records to
determine whether certain health indicators in a given population have changed. Not only do the
results from these evaluations help to improve programs, but insight gathered can also often be
used for the first essential service list above.

10. Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems

One of the most important ways public health works to protect the health and safety of a
community is through asking questions, gathering data, and finding new and better ways to solve
problems. Public health research done on vehicular crashes brought us safer cars and seat belts.
Persistent investigations of a dental anomaly led to the inclusion of fluoride in drinking water. A
better understanding of our immune system resulted in developing vaccines that have
saved millions of lives and billions of dollars.