PRINCIPLES OF PUBLIC HEALTH
"Public health is the science and art of disease prevention, prolonging life and promoting health
and well-being through organized community effort for the sanitation of the environment, the
control of communicable diseases, the organization of medical and nursing services for the early
diagnosis and prevention of disease, the education of the individual in personal health and the
development of the social machinery to ensure for everyone a standard of living adequate for the maintenance or improvement of health (1). The goal of public health is to fulfi l every society’s ambition to create conditions in which all people can be healthy. Public health addresses the health of the population as a whole rather than the treatment of individuals. WHO defi nes health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infi rmity” (2). “Healthy people in healthy communities” is the ultimate goal of all public health interventions, which are aimed at promoting physical and mental health and preventing disease, injury and disability (3). Public health is particularly concerned with threats to the overall health of the community. As interventions are aimed primarily at prevention, monitoring the health of the community through surveillance of cases assumes great importance as does the promotion of a healthy lifestyle and healthy behaviour. In many cases, however, treating a disease can be vital to preventing it in other people, such as during an outbreak of a communicable disease. Another way of describing public health is “collective action for sustained population-wide health improvement” (4). This defi nition highlights the focus on actions and interventions that need collaborative actions, sustainability (i.e. the need to embed policies within supportive systems) and the goals of public health (population-wide health improvement and the reduction of health inequalities).
Since the 1980s, the focus of public health interventions has broadened towards population-level issues such as inequity, poverty and education and has moved away from advocating for change in the behaviour of individuals. The health of people is affected by many elements ranging from genetics to socioeconomic factors such as where they live, their income, education and social relationships.
These are the social determinants of health, and they pervade every society in the world. Predictably, poor people have more health problems and worse health than the better-off sections of populations (5). Today public health seeks to correct these inequalities by advocating policies and initiatives that aim to improve the health of populations in an equitable manner.
The extension of life expectancy and the ageing of populations globally are predicted to increase
the prevalence of many noncommunicable, chronic, progressive conditions including neurological
disorders. The increasing capacity of modern medicine to prevent death has also increased the
frequency and severity of impairment attributable to neurological disorders. This has raised the
issue of restoring or creating a life of acceptable quality for people who suffer from the sequelae
of neurological disorders."......
