CH.1 Annotations

In chapter one, the author Virginia Berridge went into detail on what public health exactly is, and some of the origins that it has. This is quite the difficult thing to do, as public health wraps itself around a wide variety of issues throughout history and the current day. Even though public health is an ever changing field the general goal has stayed the same, to promote the health of the people. It can do this either at the local level, state level, national level, or even the international level.  

She goes over the changing definitions that public health has so commonly had. In 1988 Donald Acheson’s idea of public health was along the lines of preventing disease to elongate the lives of the citizens by using society to create change. In 2004, Derek Wanless added the idea of informing the public on their choices. In only 16 years, the definition of public health changed massively, showing how fluid the field of public health is.

Along with this, chapter one goes over the three domains of public health. The first of these is health improvement. Health improvement is the act of trying to change the determinants of health through promoting healthy lifestyles and environments. The second section of public health is health protection. This section tries to protect people. It can do this through the use of vaccines, injury preventions, screenings, and many more. The third and last section of public health is health service improvement. This section aims to provide services to all of the population, improve the services that the population has, and make sure that all services are readily available to the population.

Some of the critiques about public health are also made clear in this chapter. One of these critiques is quite simply that the definition of public health is so very broad, and what it should be doing is always under debate. Some say that because the definition of public heath is so broad, people can sometimes make large stretches to get personal gain.  Another issue surrounding public health is the question on how it should take on health issues. Should it focus on easier more technical fixes, or should it try to make much larger and more difficult social changes?  The larger social change requires a foot in politics, which some people don’t think public health should be in. Social change also requires massive social shifts, and as such is much harder to accomplish without push back. The idea of a nanny state is when public health oversteps its borders into personal freedoms, even though they may be causing a benefit to the health of the population.