Chapter 13: Exam 2 Flashcards
An official governmental body responsible for assuring the health of citizens residing within a country, municipality, township, or territory.
Public Health Department
Strive to protect and improve the health of their communities by preventing and controlling the spread of disease and injury, protecting against environmental hazards, promoting and supporting healthy behaviors, and preparing for and responding to emergencies.
Local Health Department
A centralized unit of state government with overarching responsibility for protecting, assuring, and improving the health of the state’s citizens. A unit of state government that matches this broad definition exists in each of the nation’s fifty states.
State Health Departments
The Department of Health ensures the provision of appropriate health and social care services, both in clinical settings such as hospitals and GP’s surgeries, and in the community through nursing, social work, and other professional services. Focuses on issues related to the general health of the citizenry.
National Health Department
What are the goals and functions of the Public Health Department?
The mission of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is to enhance the health and well-being of Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services. They have a goal of attaining high-quality, longer lives free of preventable diseases, disability, injury, and premature death. Achieve health equity, eliminate disparities, and improve the health of all groups. Assuring an adequate local public health infrastructure, promoting healthy communities and health behaviors, preventing the spread of communicable disease, protecting against environmental health hazards, and preparing for and responding to health emergencies.
What are the rules of Public Health Nurses (PHN)?
Nurses who work within PHD’s are usually considered to be PHNs. PHNs make up over one of the largest professional groups within the health department. Not all PHNs work within an official agency.
What are the core functions of PHNs?
Today PHN’s who work in PHDs promote and protect the health of the entire population in a community through three core public health functions:
-Population assessment
-Assurance of well-coordinated system of health promotion and health-care services
-Policy development to support the health of the community
What are the types of health departments?
Mixed/shared
Decentralized
Centralized
PHDs are operated under shared or combined authority of the state health agency, board of health, and local governments (16 states) *Rhode Island and Hawaii have local HDs, not PHDs.
Mixed/shared
PHDs are operated by local government with or without a board of health (27 states).
Decentralized
PHDs are operated by a state health agency or board of health, and the PHD functions under the state agency (5 states).
Centralized
Attainment of the highest level of health for all people.
Health Equity
How does health equity and equality differentiate?
When people have “the opportunity to attain their full health potential and no one is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because if their social position or other socially determined circumstance.”
How is health equity achieved?
Achieving health equity requires valuing everyone equally with focuses and ongoing societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities, historical and contemporary injustices, and the elimination of health and health care disparities.
