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Community in Public Health

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With a myriad of professionals and stakeholders in the public health industry, it is a difficult task to align all efforts in a framework that promotes the overall health of populations. During the late 1970s, hundreds of public health experts collaborated to confront high-priority community health issues. This grand dialogue amongst researchers resulted in the publication of the Healthy People report, which emphasized the impacts of health determinants and personal behavior on the health of individuals. By focusing on preventative health services, health protection, and health promotion, the Healthy People reports challenge public health services to meet specific, population-based health objectives by the end of the decade. Whether the objectives might be to reduce the prevalence of a communicable disease or improve birth rates, all the objectives are intended to meet these overarching goals of the report: eliminate health disparities and promote quality of life for all population members. In the most recent report, Healthy People 2020, the new national health agenda added new focus areas to its objective list; some of those focus areas are LGBT health, healthcare-associated infections, and global health. In addition, the report outlined four health measures to evaluate progress in efforts that meet the objectives of the report: general health status, health-related quality of life, determinants of health, and health disparities. The objectives of the Healthy People reports provide a national standard that public health administrators aspire to obtain through their programs and initiatives. These managers can incorporate the report goals into the strategy development phase of program planning; this assures that public health programs aligned with the objectives laid in the report will promulgate the national health agenda and promote a healthy US population. The reports also highlight the importance that management and infrastructure play in the delivery of public health activities; officials who read the report can implement these strategies directly into their programs. Public health endeavors strive to improve the health of populations, which comprise various collections of individuals. However, certain populations can be complex in their structure and behavior. Because of this complexity, public health initiatives designed for a whole population might be too broad in scope and may inhibit the effectiveness of those programs. Within the population, individuals interact with one another through myriad communities defined by determinants such as age, family ties, ethnicity, cultural beliefs, and several others. Social interactions that occur within these communities shape the personal behaviors of individuals, which directly impact the overall health of the individual. Public health administrators who understand the health issues and intricacies of these communities can design and implement public health programs that mitigate endemic health problems and improve the health of those communities. Such focused efforts can be potentially more effective than broad public health initiatives proposed at an institutional level much higher than the community. Communities house strong institutions that directly improve the health of local individuals or possess resources that, when utilized effectively in public health efforts, promote the overall health of the population within the community. Public health administrators who design and implement public health programs should recognize the influence certain institutions have on the health of a community and potentially collaborate with those community partners to establish strong public health efforts. Governmental agencies have the ultimate task of ensuring the success of public health initiatives, but it would be an incredible burden on those agencies to provide all health services to the populations they represent. By partnering with private institutions and local initiatives, public agencies leverage community resources to establish more effective public health programs, which in turn assures improving health of populations.

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