Question

Discuss how Global Health and Public Health coincide with one another, give examples.
Public health schools remain at the forefront of efforts to educate global health experts who are prepared to confront the global burden of disease.

What could you learn from topics and what would you do in the future?

Answer 1

Public health: It focuses on the science, practice and efforts to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong quality of life among the population. It includes not only health care sector but also many other disciplines like epidemiology, behavioral science, medicine, social work, engineering, communication, business, law, and global health.

Global health: It is an area for study, research and practice that places a priority on improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide. It emphasizes transnational health issues, determinants, and solutions. It involves many disciplines within and beyond the health sciences. Although global health places greater priority on prevention, it also embraces curative, rehabilitative, and other aspects of clinical medicine and the study of basic sciences.

Global health and public health are indistinguishable. Both view health in terms of physical, mental, and social wellbeing, rather than merely the absence of disease. Both emphasise population-level policies, as well as individual approaches to health promotion. And both address the root causes of ill-health through a broad array of scientific, social, cultural, and economic strategies. Global Health and Public Health are two specialties of healthcare that have similar overarching goals of reaching the betterment of individual health, constant improvement in longevity, improve quality of life, socioeconomic upliftment, manage and mitigate short term and long-term health risks, etc.

Global Health issues are becoming a common feature of Medical and Public Health Schools worldwide. Now-a-days there is a need to incorporate the global health approach in the training of future medical doctors, in particular public health specialists, with the aim of providing current and future health professionals with the skills to deal with the challenges posed by globalization at the local level.

For example, when an epidemic emerges, it often crosses the national borders, which requires doctors from various countries to collaborate to stop the outbreak and heal the sick. In such circumstances a good medical school education includes curriculum on global health issues and sends students to do service learning projects in countries that lack adequate medical care. Global health programs in medical schools address both health concerns that plague all nations, such as obesity, diabetes and sexual transmitted diseases, and those prevalent in particular regions, such as tropical diseases and water-borne illnesses.

Public health schools remain at the forefront of efforts to educate global health experts who are prepared to confront the global burden of disease. They bring systems approaches and a focus on prevention science and evidence-based interventions to that effort, along with a multidisciplinary faculty and ties to communities, public sector agencies, non-governmental organizations, and government ministries. Medicine and clinical care remain essential pillars of that system, but the greater payoff comes with an integrated, multidisciplinary, prevention-oriented approach in the community as well as in the clinic.