Partnerships

This chapter should help you understand: what is meant by partnership; how national and local contexts influence partnership; what processes and interactions are key to partnership success; how to develop partnership and achieve collaboration; key elements of success and the signs of a faltering partnership.

Working in teams in public health

This chapter will help you: define types, characteristics, and roles of teams in the context of public health; identify common challenges experienced by teams; consider strategies to foster high-performing teams; Suggest methods to assess, evaluate, and improve team effectiveness.

Effective negotiating

The work of public health requires frequent decision making, problem solving, and transactions among people who have different stakes in the outcome. When authority is distributed among those people—such that no one stakeholder can make a unilateral and binding decision upon others— then that outcome is negotiated. Those negotiations involve exchanges in which the parties both contribute and glean expertise, resources, and information through the process. The tenor of the negotiation is often determined by the temperament, strategies, and desired outcomes that each of the stakeholders bring to the process. Are the negotiations collaborative or contentious? How are the parties framing the questions and issues to be resolved? What is each hoping to achieve, and might there be opportunities to reap mutual benefits?

Planning health services

This chapter shows you how to contribute to planning health services successfully at strategic and operational levels. It first explains what health service planning is and the nature of health services as mainly ‘soft’ systems. It provides a conceptual framework for planning and then goes through steps and tasks in planning. It then suggests some ways of overcoming pitfalls, notes some common fallacies about planning, and provides a real planning case study with its successes and failures. Finally, it notes ways to assess how well you are doing

Health, sustainability, and climate change

This chapter will help you understand the importance of, and the relationships between, health, health and care systems, sustainable development, and climate change, and to do so locally and globally. The specific objectives of the chapter are to help you: make the case for action by understanding how science, law, policies, and values can be framed and translated into specific and system wide actions; translate what is known and what protects and creates health into policy and practice, and help address barriers to implementation and quality improvement in health and care systems; engage a wide range of stakeholders to ensure appropriate cross-system action involving a diverse group of people, skills, and influences across the health and care system.

Regulation

The objectives of this chapter are to help you understand: the impact of legislation, regulations, and litigation on the public’s health; the powers, duties, and restraints imposed by the law on public health officials; the potential of legal change to improve the public’s health; the role of international law and institutions in securing public health in the face of increasing globalization.

Influencing international policy

This chapter will help you understand: the relationships between international policy and policy action at multiple levels; why public health practitioners should build an international dimension into their work; how to influence and advance public health internationally, even through local action. The chapter uses examples from the world of food and health policy (on which the authors work) to illustrate the structures and processes of engagement you may encounter. In the policy worlds of both global public health and food, there is a mix of improvement and threats, inequalities alongside progress, fragmentation, and coherence. Similar trends in the global South and developed countries may have underlying drivers at work, resulting in the double burden of disease. It is preferable to ensure that international policies tackle rather than ignore those determinants.

Statistical understanding

In public health practice, you are likely to use statistics for two purposes as follows: To summarize information about populations (descriptive statistics); To make inferences from data derived from research or other analysis (inferential statistics). The objective of this chapter is to help you (a) understand when statistical analysis would be useful, and (b) interpret correctly the statistics you encounter. It also contains an outline of how to use standardization to compare two populations.

Information technology and informatics

After reading this chapter, you should be able to: identify the emerging sub-disciplines within biomedical and health; informatics that are critical to the skilful use of health information and communications technology in the health sciences; appreciate how informatics is applied to public health, clinical medicine, and research, and that its roles are in rapid evolution; consider clinical informatics as a professional career choice regardless of your health discipline.

Assessing health impacts

By reading this chapter, you will become familiar with: the definition and purpose of health impact assessment (HIA); concepts and values that underpin?HIA; the stages of an HIA process; methods used in?HIA; experiences of?HIA.