What is Public Health? What are the Goals and Values of Public Health?

Public Health Significance and Personal Health

Public health refers to the science of safeguarding and improving family and community health by promoting a healthy way of living, researching into injury and disease prevention, and identifying and controlling communicable diseases in a timely manner. On the whole, public health's focus is the safeguarding of whole populations' health, right from local communities to entire nations and world regions.

Public health workers aim at disease prevention before their onset or recurrence via the implementation of educational initiatives, policy recommendations, research, and delivery of appropriate services; this is contrary to nurses, physicians and other clinical healthcare workers whose chief focus is treatment after a person gets injured or diagnosed with a health problem. Furthermore, public health strives towards bridging the healthcare gap. Public health endeavors largely aim at fostering healthcare accessibility, equity, and quality (CDC Foundation, 2016).

The population health-individual relationship is constructed partly on medicine's general categorization into public health and clinical medicine. This represents an irony at the public health domain's core -- an ethical struggle between the population's good and that of the individual. One cannot simply explain such conflict away. But, under certain circumstances, this disagreement may be settled by taking it to a different platform, viewing it from a different perspective. Individuals' optimal health differs from that of the overall group, and clinicians' responsibilities may clash with those of public health workers. The latter implicitly give precedence to the overall society's wellbeing over individual wellbeing and, in pursuit of public health, personal health cases might be impaired.

Public health interventions having the potential to provide immense national benefits might end up harming, or only minimally benefiting, a majority of individual patients. This occurs for the reason that a population's statistical construct is essentially a biological entity independent from the people it comprises of (an ecological... This objective has long constituted the default notion underlying the purpose of the public health sphere, beginning with the basic sanitation issues of the nineteenth century, and other areas later addressed when the welfare societies of the western world were being constructed. But the public health domain began undergoing an expansion in the seventies, to encompass issues pertaining to distribution of some particular population health quantity in a given society. Specifically, health disparities were highlighted as major public health issues, and action plans were formulated for empowering a number of poor or weak social groups.
Equality

As stated in the previous paragraph, the seventies witnessed an expansion of the public health domain to cover issues concerning distribution of some particular population health quantity in a given society, with particular emphasis on health gaps and development of actions to empower poor or weak population clusters. This way, it becomes apparent that the disparity-related concern is targeted at health state as well as health opportunity distribution (like healthcare-connected knowledge, access and education, in addition to different types of material resources).

Autonomy

Critics of public health slam it for its indifference towards individuals and, particularly, towards personal autonomy (criticizing, for instance, collectivist and paternalist health policies, management of contagious diseases, vaccination and screening programs, and so forth). Several other factors were presumed to be working too, like the growing linkage between public health workers and operative healthcare organizations. Ultimately, no matter what, the outcome was the emergence of precisely what medical ethicists claimed was lacking in public health. In the eighties and nineties, a public health trend of placing more emphasis on combining health opportunity provision and related information, and respecting the decision of individuals with regard to employing such chances…