Pharmaceutical public health Flashcards
What is public health?
“The science and the art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting physical health and efficiency through organized community efforts” e.g.:
Sanitation of the environment,
Control of community infections,
Education of personal hygiene,
Organization of medical and nursing services
What is pharmaceutical public health?
Pharmaceutical public health (PPH) services focus on the community or population rather than the individual
Doesn’t just purely examine and solve health problems because at a population level many health problems are related to social, cultural, political and economic issues as well
Therefore, PPH needs expertise on epidemiology, biomedical sciences, biostatistics, behavioral and environmental sciences
What are the core functions of public health?
Health promotion and disease prevention
Monitoring and surveillance
Development of public health policy
Social justice and equity of access of services
Equity in health outcomes
Roles in developing links and policy with government and other non-governmental or professional bodies
How are PPH services developed?
- Health needs assessment (HNA) -
Examine and define the nature and scope of the issue. The ideal provision takes into account need, supply and demand;
Need – what people benefit from.
Supply – current healthcare provision.
Demand – what people ask for.
A HNA is a combination of quantitative (pre-existing health stats) and qualitative (focus groups of interviews) techniques are often used to obtain data for a needs assessment
- Planning the service -
Need to consider local and national policy content, local need (HNA), evidence-base, service specifications, service model or methodology, service implementation and evaluation, obtaining supporters and developing the business case.
Pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) -
Common challenges – higher prices, higher transport costs, increased shelf outages, reductions in choice and reliability, increased energy costs, shortages of electronic components, increased shipping costs, staff shortages.
Specific challenges – supply chain visibility, security (to supply chain), drug counterfeiting, cold-chain management, rising pharmaceutical cost, product-specific challenges.
