Measuring Health status of a Community Flashcards
What is health?
a state of complete physical, mental and social well being not merely the absence of disease infirmity
What is public health interested in?
- Quantifying the occurrence of disease (or any other health-related event) in populations.
- Describing distribution of disease (or any other health-related event) in a population.
- Describing determinants
What are the population characteristics that affect health?
- demographic
- socioeconomic
- lifestyle/behavioural
Examples of demographic population characteristics that affect health?
- Age
- Gender
- Religion
- Ethnic group
- Household size
- Number of living children
Examples of socioeconomic characteristics that affect health?
- Marital status
- Residence
- Education attainment
- Wealth
- Employment status
- School attendance
- Access to services, facilities etc
- Drinking water
- Sanitation
Examples of the lifestyle/behavioural characteristics that affect health?
Use of recreational substances: tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption
What are the aims of the population health assessment?
- Goal setting
- Needs assessment
- Planning: Improve resource allocation
- Support policy reviews
Purpose of assessing population health status?
- Needs assessment
- Support policy making
- Support planning and implementation
- Support evaluation
- Identify research needs
What are the aspects of health that need to be assessed?
- Determinants of health
- Health status
What are vital statistics?
quantitative data concerning the population such as the number of births, marriages and deaths
Examples of vital statistics?
- birth
e.g. birth rates, total fertility rates - Death
e.g. infant mortality rate, under-five mortality rate, crude death rates, age-specific death rates - medical data
e.g. HIV prevalence
What information is required to measure health status?
- Demographic
- Socioeconomic
- Vital statistics
- Morbidity & mortality
- Health services and healthcare providers
- Environmental health
- Geographical information
What are the sources of data?
- Observation
- resource persons
- clinic data
- reports e.g. census, surveys, special registers
What is the rationale for measuring health and disease of a population?
- Identify & prioritize health problems for action
- Data collection for planning, management and evaluation of healthcare & disease programs
- Surveillance of endemic illness & early detection of epidemics
- Identifying determinants of disease for preventive action
What are the ways of assessing health status (measurements)?
- Functional measures/ perception
- Disease-specific measures/problem verification
- Utility measures/priority setting
- Global measures/problem analysis
