Public Health Flashcards
Explain the 3 domains of public health
- Health improvement: societal interventions to prevent disease, promote health, and reduce inequalities
- Health protection: measure to control infectious disease risks and environmental hazards
- Health care: organisation and delivery or safe, high quality services for prevention, treatment, and care
What are the 3 main levels that public health interventions can be considered?
- Ecological (population): changes in organisations, policies, laws, to impact population health (e.g. banning smoking in public places)
- Community: changes in community awareness, attitudes, behaviours (e.g. outdoor gym equipment for local community)
- Individual: changes knowledge, beliefs, behaviours of one person or family (e.g. childhood immunisations)
What is primordial prevention?
- Preventing risk developing
- e.g. laws to penalise substance misuse, affects those with no substance misuse who are healthy and not at risk
What is primary prevention?
- Preventing a problem developing when a risk exists
- e.g. targeted education and health promotion to those engaging in recreational drug use and at risk of substance misuse disorders
What is secondary prevention?
- Early identification and preventing the problem progressing
- e.g. drug treatment service (e.g. needle exchange, safe injecting sites, overdose naloxone) to those with clinical effects substance misuse disorders
What is tertiary prevention?
- preventing the worst outcome or complications
- e.g. drug treatment services or hospital care to prevent organ damage, death, or suicide
What are determinants of health?
- rainbow by Whitehead, 1991
- Constitutional factors (age, sex)
- Individual lifestyle factors (diet, exercise, smoking/alcohol)
- Social and community networks (social support, activities, community projects)
- Living and working conditions (housing, care services, water and food, work environment, education)
- General socio-economic, cultural and environmental conditions
Define horizontal equity
- Equal treatment for equal need
- e.g. individuals with pneumonia (with all other things being equal) should be treated equally
Define vertical equity
- Unequal treatment for unequal need
- e.g. individuals with common cold vs pneumonia need unequal treatment
- e.g. areas with poorer health may need higher expenditure on health services
How can health care equity be examined?
- Supply of health care
- Access to health care
- Utilisation of health care
- Health care outcomes
- Health status
- Resource allocation of health and other services (e.g. housing, education)
- Wider determinants of health
What are the 4 stages of the planning cycle in a needs assessment?
Needs Assessment
Planning
Implementation
Evaluation
Define need, supply, and demand
- Need: the ability to benefit from an intervention
- Supply: what we actually provide
- Demand: what people ask for
Explain Bradshaw’s taxonomy of social need (4 types of need)
- Felt: individual perceptions of variation from normal health (want)
- Expressed: individual seeks help to overcome the felt need (demand)
- Normative: professional defines intervention appropriate for the expressed need (need)
- Comparative: comparison between severity, range of interventions, and cost
What are the 3 approaches to health need assessments?
Epidemiological
Corporate
Comparative
Explain the epidemiological approach to health needs assessments
Uses disease incidence and prevalence in terms of:
- People: age, gender, occupation etc.
- Place: varying geographically
- Time: varying in seasons/cycles
What are the advantages and disadvantages of epidemiological approach to HNAs?
- Advantages: uses existing data, evaluates service by trends over time
- Disadvantages: quality of data is variable, does not consider felt needs or opinions of people affected
What sources of data are used in an epidemiological health needs assessment?
Population and census data
Birth/death registries
Primary care data
Hospital activity data
Survey data
Explain the corporate approach to health needs assessments
- A structured collection of knowledge/views of ‘stakeholders’
- Based on demands/wishes/perspectives of interested parties (professional, political, public)
- Uses focus groups, interviews, public meetings, etc
What are the advantages and disadvantages of corporate approach to HNAs?
- Advantages: based on felt and expressed needs, recognises knowledge/experience of those working with population
- Disadvantages: difficult to distinguish need from demand, may be influenced by political agendas
Explain the comparative approach to health needs assessments
- Compares health performance across communities, disease groups, service providers
- Can be spatial (e.g. different towns) or social (e.g. different ages, social class)
- Measures variation in cost and service use
What are the advantages and disadvantages of comparative approach to HNAs?
- Advantages: quick and cheap, indicates whether health provision is better/worse than comparable areas
- Disadvantages: may be difficult to find comparable population, may not yield what appropriate level should be
What are the benefits to health needs assessments?
- Strengthens community involvement in decision making
- Improved public participation
- Improved team working and partnership
- Improved patient care and use of resources
- Improved communication with other agencies and public
- Professional development of skills
What are the challenges to health needs assessments?
- Professional boundaries prevent information sharing
- Lack of commitment from top-down
- Problems accessing local data or target population
- Difficulty maintaining momentum and commitment
What is the 5 stage approach for a health needs assessment?
- by Cavanagh and Chadwick
1. Getting started (choose population, resources, aims)
2. Identify health priorities (gather data, assess health conditions, determining factors, and perceptions of needs)
3. Assessing a health priority for action (choose condition/factor with biggest influence, determine interventions)
4. Planning for change (action planning, monitoring, and evaluation)
5. Moving on/review (learning from project, measure impact)
What are the three approaches to resource allocation?
Egalitarian:
- provide all care that is necessary and require for everyone
- good because it’s equal
- bad because it’s too expensive
Maximising:
- act is evaluated solely in terms of it’s consequences
- good because resources allocated to those most likely to benefit
- bad because those who don’t make the cut receive nothing
Libertarian:
- each is responsible for their own health
- good because it promotes positive engagement
- bad because most diseases are not self inflicted
Define health psychology
The role of psychological factors in the cause, progression, and consequences of health and illness, by promoting healthy behaviours and preventing illness
Explain the 3 main categories of health behaviours
- Health behaviour: aimed to prevent disease (e.g. eating healthily)
- Illness behaviour: aimed to seek remedy (e.g. going to doctor)
- Sick role behaviour: aimed at getting well (e.g. taking prescribed medication)
What are some solutions to health impairing behaviours?
Population level intervention:
- health promotion (e.g. change 4 life campaign)
- enables people to exert control over the determinants of health, so improves health
Individual level intervention:
- patient centre approach
- care responsive to individual needs
- e.g. 1 to 1 wellbeing coaching
Mixed level intervention:
- e.g. brief primary care intervention to reduce alcohol consumption could impact individuals (individual health outcomes), community (lower alcohol-related crime levels), or population (demographic patterns of liver disease)
Explain the theory of unrealistic optimism
- Weinstein, 1983
When individuals continue to practice health damaging behaviour due to inaccurate perceptions of risk and susceptibility, influenced by: - lack of personal experience with the problem
- belief that the problem is preventable by personal action
- belief that if its not happened by now, its not likely to
- belief that the problem is infrequent
List some reasons why people engage in health impairing behaviours
Health beliefs
Situational rationality
Culture variability
Stress
Age
Socioeconomic factors
What health outcomes are associated with lower risk perception?
Reduced attendance to health services
Reduced adherence to their medical regimen
Describe the health belief model
- Becker, 1974
Individuals will change if they believe: - they are susceptible to the condition
- it has serious consequences
- taking action reduces susceptibility
- the benefits of taking cation outweigh the costs
What are the advantages and disadvantages to the health belief model?
Advantages:
- longest standing model of behaviour change
- successful for a range of health beliefs (e.g. breast self-examination, vaccinations, diabetes management)
Disadvantages:
- alternative factors may influence health behaviour (e.g. outcome expectancy, self-efficacy)
- does not differentiate between first time and repeat behaviour
- cues to action (internal/external) are often missing
Describe the theory of planned behaviour
*Ajzen, 1988
The best predictor of behaviour is ‘intention’, determined by:
- a persons attitude to the behaviour
- subjective norm (the perceived social pressure to undertake the behaviour)
- perceived behavioural control: a personal appraisal of the ability to perform the behaviour