Much has been said about the health of this countrys population, the burden of cost to the Government and the need to improve health outcomes. However, little has been mentioned about the public health workforce, who are expected to find solutions and create healthier communities.
We must not lose sight of the importance of the public health industry. We must pay close attention to public health education if we want to improve the well-being of the nation.
Public health education is important for producing professionals trained in disease prevention and management, reducing the number of persons needing treatment and increasing the number of people who can live without treatment.
In other words, we need public health professionals to play an integral role in helping the Government reduce the burden of healthcare cost.
We must prepare public health professionals to be trained in identifying epidemic, endemic and pandemic disease patterns.
We must prepare public health professionals to identify behaviour models and cultural and other differences that impede the success of health promotions programmes.
We must prepare public health professionals to address health care reform.
We must produce human resources to monitor and draw conclusions about what, where, who, why and how chronic diseases develop and linger in spite of state-of-the-art treatment programmes. This requires development and research.
We have very few people trained in public health to fill the gap in human resource capacity for public health.
Many positions are filled with people trained in clinical medicine who have worked very hard to become qualified doctors, pharmacists and dentists.
Since these types of degrees rarely include studies in epidemiology, behavioural models, public health policy, health management, biostatistics and environmental health, we need to rebalance our public health workforce. Licensed clinical professionals alone are not sufficient to solve the problems we read about in newspapers every week, regarding the health of the nation.
We need public health trained professionals.
Therefore legislation to increase public health education and expand the number of people trained in critical areas such as epidemiology, behavioural health, biostatistics and research methods with an emphasis on community based participatory research and public health policy is important in achieving the vision.
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