Public health approach is widely regarded as the approach that is most likely to produce significant and sustained results in research concerning major public health issues including drug addiction, violence, suicide, and alcoholism. It consists of four major steps: surveillance, risk factor identification, intervention evaluation, and implementation. After the implementation phase, the cycle is repeated in order to evaluate the program results to which the public action shall then be based. Why is taking a public health approach important for research?
Public health is defined by CEA Winslow (1923) as “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts for the sanitation of the environment, the control of community infection, the education of the individual in principles of personal hygiene, the organization of medical and nursing services for the early diagnosis and preventive treatment of disease, and the development of the social machinery which will ensure to every individual in the community a standard of living adequate for the maintenance of health.
” From this definition, we can say that public health has many functions that must be carried out to attain the task of “preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency. ” Some of the essential functions of public health are: (i) monitor health status to identify community health problems, (ii) diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community, (iii) inform, educate, and empower people about health issues, (iv) mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems, and (v) enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.
However, in order to achieve these functions, there are several factors that have to be studied. Research is a key towards successful policy-making and implementation of laws and regulations. Public health approach is widely regarded as the approach that is most likely to produce significant and sustained results in research concerning major public health issues including drug addiction, violence, suicide, and alcoholism.
The public health approach was developed systematically to serve as a guideline in obtaining necessary information which will be useful in determining what actions the public shall take, that is, basing from the functions of the public health. The public health approach is used to define the health problem, identify the different risk factors associated with the problem, develop and test community-level interventions to control or prevent the cause of the problem, implement interventions to improve the health of the population, and monitor those interventions to assess their effectiveness.
As a guideline in conducting researches, it has four sets of steps which are tightly connected to each other. Each step is necessary in the research process. The first step is surveillance. This is basically answering the question that was given above: what is the problem. Here, the researcher needs to identify the cause of the problem or the problem itself using in-depth analysis of the statistical data and perhaps keen observation.
The next step is the risk factor identification which also answers what causes such problem(s). Here, the researcher needs to examine all possible causes of the problem and then move on to the next step. The intervention evaluation step is carried out to determine which hypothesis is true or effective in solving the problem. Then finally, the researcher will proceed to the implementation step which answers the question ‘how do you do it?
’ Here, it is the policy-making body that will decide on matters that require public action to solve what needs to be solved. This guideline is very much effective in dealing with public health issues. But before reaching to the conclusion, it is important that the researcher identifies the basic methods and practices such as collection of data, analysis, and interpretation of the data that will fill in the missing links between the steps given above.
Let’s look at a sample case that used the public health approach in research and implementation: drowning in Arizona. Drowning was found out to be the leading cause of death among children aging 0-4 from 1986-1996. How did they find out? They did an in-depth research that was aimed at decreasing the death rate for drowning to 1. 3/100,000. Results showed that most accidents occurred simply because a number of pools were not fenced and the children of the given ages were free to jump into the enticing pool.
The solution was simple; the government decided to pass a legislation addressed to pool-owners to put a surrounding barrier around the bodies of water (as lagoons and park pools were frequent ‘killers’) where the children can not easily cross. The result was a whooping 60% decrease in child drowning. This case alone shows how important the use of the public health approach in doing research studies on public health.
References “The public health approach. ” Retrieved 8 March 2008, from http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/approach/public_health/en/index.html