Public Health Flashcards
What is health?
complete physical mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease
What are the 3 domains of public health?
Health Improvement
Health Protection
Improving Services
What is equality and what is equity?
Equality: Everyone is given the same treatment
Equity: Everyone is given different treatment to ensure equal chance of success
What is horizontal equality and vertical equality?
Horizontal: Equal treatment for equal need
Vertical: Unequal treatment for unequal need
What is a health needs assessment?
A systematic approach to assess a populations needs for health care to inform decision making and planning for service provisions
What are the stages of the planning cycle?
- Health Needs Assessment
- Planning
- Implementing
- Evaluating
What are Bradshaw’s needs?
+ what is each?
- Felt need- what people feel they need
- Expressed need- what people say they need
- Normative need- what an external party (e.g. doctor) assesses the person needs based on what is expressed
- Comparative need- comparison of severity, range of interventions and cost
What are the 3 approaches to health needs assessment?
- Epidemiological
- Comparative
- Corporate
What is the Epidemiological approach?
+advantages/ disadvantages?
Top down; gathers data on a population and how they are effected by an issue. Based on this they evaluate potential interventions, and consider its efficacy.
Adv.: Can collect data, personalised to this population, can evalutate trends over time
Disadv.: Don’t consider felt or expressed needs, data may be of poor quality
What is the Comparative approach?
+advantages/ disadvantages?
You compare the health needs and interventions of the population in question to a similar population to evaluate what is needed, what interventions are working/ not working, and implement them accordingly.
Adv.: Quick and cheap, uses existing data, gives measure of relative performance
Disadv: Data might not be available, can’t find an identical population
What is the Corporate approach?
+advantages/ disadvantages?
Discuss with individuals in the population to determine what they think is necessary for their health needs and services.
Adv.: Utilise expertise within local population, based on felt and expressed needs, wide range of views
Disadv.: Difficult to distinguish between peoples’ needs and demands, open to biased influences
What are the approaches to ill health prevention?
+ what do they mean?
- Primary- Preventing a disease from happening
- Secondary- Managing a disease in the early stages
- Tertiary- Preventing a disease from recurring or causing complicationg
What are the types of screening?
Opportunistic
Commercial
Population based
Pre-employment/ occupational
What are the disadvantages of screening?
- Causes distress to people unnecessarily
- Not always cost effective
- Method of screening could be dangerous (e.g. radiation)
- Over-medicalising people and treating unnecessarily
What are the Wilson and Junger criteria for screening?
The condition:
- Must know it’s natural history
- Must be an important health problem
- Must have a subclinical phase
The screening tool:
- Must be acceptable
- Must be safe
- Must be able to accurately identify those with the disease, and exclude those without the disease
The treatment:
- Must have an effective treatment
- Must have a clear threshold for treatment
Facilities and logistics:
- Must be cost effective
- There must be the facilities to carry out the screening and the management for those identified with the disease
- Must be an ongoing process (i.e. can’t just screen for breast cancer once in 2013)
What is sensitivity?
The ability of a screening tool to identify people with the disease
All people with the disease
What is specificity?
The ability of a screening people to correctly exclude people without the disease
All the people without the disease
What positive predictive value?
The proportion of those people who the screening tool has identified as having a disease, who actually have the disease
All the people identified to have the disease by the screening tool
What is negative predictive value?
The proportion of those people who the screening tool has identified as not having a disease, who actually don’t have the disease
All the people identified to not have the disease by the screening tool
What is lead time bias?
Screening makes it seem like the process of screening has extended peoples’ prognosis/ life expectancy but they have just identified a disease earlier + have identified a number of diseases that never would have reached a clinical presentation
What is length time bias?
Screening makes it seem like the process of screening has extended peoples’ prognosis/ life expectancies, but they only identify the long term diseases and those with less aggressive forms of the disease.
Ie. the people with more aggressive forms would either already have been identified or perhaps already be dead.
What is a cross sectional study?
+ advantages
+ disadvantages
Take a sample of a population at a given time point and evaluate them for a disease and exposures
Advantages:
- quick
- cheap
- large population
- good for public health planning
Disadvantages:
- no temporality (allows for ?reverse causality)
- can’t measure incidence
- recall bias