HE ED 221 Flashcards
What is the medical model of health?
- Narrow and simplistic understanding of health. Medically biased definitions focusing on the absence of disease or disability
- Doesn’t take into account the wider influences on health (outside of the physical body)
- Influenced by scientific and expert knowledge
- Emphasizes personal, individual responsibility for health (puts blame on the individual instead of a group of people
What is the social model of health?
- Beyond physical body
- Broad or complex understanding of health. More holistic definitions of health taking a wider range of factors into account such as mental and social dimensions of health
- Takes into account wider influences on health such as the environment the impact of inequalities
- Takes into account lay knowledge and understandings
Emphasizes collective, social responsibility for health
What is a population?
Group of people or individuals (in contrast to the individuals themselves) with a common characteristic
What kind of characteristics can a population be based on?
○ Place of residence
○ Age
○ Gender
○ Race/ethnicity
○ Religion
- Occurrence of a life event (e.g. giving birth, entering school, serving in the military)
What is a fixed population?
Permanent, no new people can join this population. You can also not leave this population
What are the key elements of a fixed population? provide an example
Key elements:
○ Membership is based on an event and is permanent
Example:
Japanese atomic bomb survivors
What is a dynamic or open population?
You can leave this population as well as you are able to return
What are the key elements of a dynamic/open population? provide an example
Key elements:
- Membership is based on a changeable state of condition and is transitory
Example:
Residents of a city, hospital patients
What is a steady state in regards to a dynamic or open population?
The number of people entering the population is equal to the number of people leaving
What is population health?
- An approach/way of thinking
- “An approach to health that aims to improve the health of the entire population and to reduce health inequities among population groups
- In order to reach these objectives, it looks at and acts upon the broad range of factors and conditions that have a strong influence on our health
Explain what a basic type of health research is: (what is it, what is studied, research goals, examples)
It is controlled and regulated
What is studied?: Cells, tissues, animals in laboratory settings
Research goals: Understanding disease mechanisms and the effects of toxic substances
Examples: Toxicology, Immunology
Explain what a clinical type of health research is: (what is it, what is studied, research goals, examples)
Can involve prevention
Diagnose who is sick and then treating them
What/who is studied?: Sick patients who come to health care facilities
Research goals: Improving diagnosis and treatment of disease
Examples: Internal medicine, pediatrics
Explain what a population health type of health research is: (what is it, what is studied, research goals, examples)
What/who is studied?: Populations or communities at large
Research goals: Prevention of disease, promotion of health
Examples: Epidemiology, environmental health science
What are some action areas of the Ottawa Charter?
- Strengthen community action
- Develop personal skills
- build healthy public policy
- creative supportive environments
- reorient health services
What is population health vs. public health?
Population health: The approach
Public health: the action
- The difference is subtle
- Activities (e.g. programs and services) organized and carried out typically by various levels of government to protect, promote, and restore the health of citizens
e.g. Public Health Agency of Canada, Alberta Health Services
What is a disease?
- Abnormal, medically defined changes in the structure or functioning of the human body
○ Hard to pin point
○ Determined by experts in the field - Epidemiology is focused on disease
what is a illness (or sickness)
- The individual’s experience or subjective perception of lack of physical or mental well-being and consequent inability to function normally in social roles
- Impacting day to day activity
What are the 2 types of diseases?
- 2 primary types of disease:
1) Infectious or communicable disease
2) Non-infectious or non-communicable or chronic disease
What is an infectious disease?
- “Due to a specific infectious agent or its toxic products that arises through transmission of that agent or its products from an infected person, animal or reservoir to a susceptible host”
e.g. COVID, common cold, measles, flu, etc.
How does a infectious disease get transmitted?
- Transmission
○ It can be transmitted
○ Animal to person
○ Person to person
- There is some sort of transmission
What are the infectious disease categories?
- outbreak
- epidemic
- Pandemic
What is an outbreak?
Occurrence of new cases in excess of baseline in a localised area (e.g. institution, city) very localised
What is an epidemic?
- Occurrence of new cases in excess of baseline across a country or a number of countries
- More cases than would be typical, more wide spread
What is a pandemic?
Crossing many international boundaries and affects a large number of people
can vaccine preventable diseases recur?
Yes
e.g. zika virus, influenza
What is a chronic disease?
- “non-communicable diseases (NCDs), also known as chronic diseases, are not passes from person to person. They are of long duration and generally slow progression”
○ Might not be apparent until someone is later in life
○ Diet can lead to chronic disease
e.g. diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease
what is an important marker if the accumulation of modifiable risk factors for chronic disease?
Ageing
Explain risk transition
- As a country develops, the types of diseases that affect a population shift from primarily infectious to primarily chronic
○ Improvements in medical care
○ Public health interventions
- The ageing of population
What are the 3 levels of prevention to protect and promote health?
- primary prevention
- Secondary prevention
- tertiary prevention
What is primary prevention?
Preventing disease
What is secondary prevention?
Early detection of disease
What is tertiary prevention?
Reduce complications associated with chronic diseases
What is a individual- based approach?
- traditional medical approach
- identify high-risk susceptible individuals and offer individual protection
- screening
- truncates the risk distribution
What is a population based approach?
- control the causes of disease in the whole population
- shift the whole risk distribution
What are some advantages of the high risk approach?
Intervention appropriate to individual
○ Individual already has a problem
- Go see a doctor, they prescribe something for you
- Something that is appropriate for that individuals problem
- Individual motivation
Have specific motivation to change their behaviour - Physician motivation
○ Help is wanted
Someone is coming to them for help
What are some disadvantages of the high risk approach?
Difficulties and cost of screening (secondary prevention)
Limited potential for the individual and population
- Behaviourally inappropriate
○ Constrained by social norms/built environment
e.g. smoking: if their whole social circle smokes, it will be harder for them to quit smoking
What are some advantages to the population based approach
- Radical
○ Remove underlying caused of the disease
§ Figure out the main causes - Large potential for the population
○ Small individual changes can lead to large effect at the population level
§ Savings on health care system - Behaviourally appropriate
Change in social norms and environment
What are some disadvantages to the population based approach
- Small benefit to individual
○ “prevention paradox”
- Everyone’s health will improve by a small amount
§ Seat belts: if you have never been in a car accident these may be less significant
§ It helps on a population level, not necessarily individual levels - Poor motivation of individual
○ No immediate reward - Poor motivation of physician
Small benefit to the individual patients
What are the 2 main types of epidemiology?
- descriptive epidemiology
- analytic epidemiology
What is descriptive epidemiology?
○ Describes the distribution of determinants, morbidity, or mortality by person, place, or time variables
○ One variable specifically
○ Describes what is going on
Used in a practical stand point
What is descriptive epidemiology useful for?
○ Assessing health status of a population
○ Generating hypotheses
Examine patterns, establish plans for public health programs
- From a public health perspective:
○ Different patterns
○ Different cities
○ Parts of cities
Provinces
What is analytic epidemiology?
○ Studies the associations or causes of diseases
2 variables
- exposure (behaviour, determinant)
- outcome (health outcome, behaviour)
What are the 2 types of descriptive study designs?
- Case studies
-cross sectional studies
What is a case study?
○ Describes characteristics of a group or cluster of individuals with the same exposure or disease/outcome
○ There is a small group and they have some sort of rare disease
Describing what is going on
What is a cross-sectional study?
○ Group of people examined at one point in time
○ Describes the prevalence of an exposure or disease/outcome
○ One snapshot in time
Not what happened in the past, not what is going to happen in the future
What is the 1 type of an analytic study design (experimental)
Randomized control trial (RCTs)
What is a randomized control trial?
○ Best experimental research design
○ The researcher will manipulate the exposure in order to change it
○ 4 fundamental steps
§ Selection of appropriate study sample
□ Conduct baseline measures: cognitive and physical
§ Randomly assign participants into an Experimental group(s) and a Control Group
§ Application of intervention
Follow-up assessment(s)
What are the 3 types of analytic study designs (observational)
- Cohort studies
- case- control studies
- cross-sectional studies
What are cohort studies?
○ Looking forward in time
○ Exposure is ascertained prior to the ascertainment of an outcome
2 groups within a population