Measuring Health

The public health approach to solving health problems has four steps:

1. identify or define the problem
2. identify risk and protective factors
3. develop and test prevention strategies
4. assure widespread adoption

Identification

Not only do we need to point out all the public health probelms, you also need to make decisions about which problems to try to solve right now.

This is because resources are limited, as problems take time, money, personnel, and space to solve.

• There are not enough resources to solve all of the public health problems at the same time.
• We need to weigh the opporutnity cost of solving each problem

Recall, the goal of public health is to: maximize the health of the population and eliminate health disparities.

A public health problem is anything that gets in the way of maximizing the helath of the population or eliminating health disparities.

What is health

WHO's definition: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and
not merely the absence of disease or infirmity

• more than not being sick

measuring helath

We have to be able to measure health (which includes the state of physical, mental, and social well-being).

We can assume sickness = less health.

• its easy to define sick
• its easy to tell from diagnostic tools
• then when diagnosed we can document it.

To quantify sickness:

• medical records
• survey the population
• healthcare providers need to report case of certain kind of diseases (notifiable diseases)

death rates

Death rates are looked at because we have access to good data on deaths.

• deaths are universally documented. recorded with death certificate and sent to central agency
• death is unambiguous. same for everyone
• Tells us how long people have lived which allows calculation of a population's life expectancy.

Life expectancy is the sum total of all the things that are affecting how long people live. THis is called a summary measure of population helath. THis is useful when comparing the health of one population with the health of another, or tracking health over time.

• however, it doen't give us information that is useful for preventing the things that are causing the deaths. We need to know what people are dieing from.

The leading cause of death in the us 2017: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, ...

• these must be prioritized.

Health Disparities

health disparities are persistance differences or "gaps" in health outcomes or health determinants between population groups.

non-fatal conditions

measuring health using data that people are mostly living with rather than dying form is important, because we can't overlook the impact of health conditions that are non-fatal.