| Popis: |
An Overemphasis on Personal Health Services in Many Public Health Agencies In the Institute of Medicine Report on the Future of Public Health, we found that by default--because of the peculiarities, shortcomings, deficiencies, and defects in the U.S. health services delivery system (notably, in the access part of the triad of cost, quality, and access)---health departments have often become the providers of personal health services of last resort. Adopting that role has crowded historic concerns for environmental health and for disease prevention and health promotion all but out off the picture in a number of those agencies. The overemphasis on personal health services is too common--not that personal health services are unimportant or that public health agencies can simply stand aside and watch people not receive services. I 'm talking about a policy matter: This policy of overemphasizing delivery of personal health care services by public health agencies is a bad policy. It's a policy that is dangerous to environmental health. Historically, public health's first concern was with sanitation and environmental hygiene, but as etiology of diseases became better known, leading to improved diagnosis and treatment, a change in emphasis occurred. And that was fine; it brought together two very important concerns in public health. The risk now is that one is outweighing the other. I think it is interesting to look at England. There, in many official agencies, environmental health, health promotion, and disease prevention activities are assigned to the same staff. That is, environmental health has adopted the disease |
