Health, sustainability, and climate change

This chapter will help you understand the relationships between health, health care, sustainability, climate change, and carbon reduction, locally and globally. The specific objectives of the chapter are to help you make the case for action by showing how health, health care, sustainable development, and climate change are linked positively such that what is good for mitigating climate change is also good for health and health care today, translate science into policy and practice and help move research and action about climate science into policy and practice, and engage a wide range of stakeholders and appreciate that, as in much public health practice, appropriate action comes from involving a diverse group of people through genuine engagement.

Innovation

This chapter discusses different approaches to problem solving in public health, including linguistic techniques, resolving multiple realities, and narrative-based public health.

Consultancy in a national strategy

This chapter introduces the steps for developing a public health strategy. It should assist you to play a constructive role as a public health consultant, working closely with government officials, policy advisers, and other stakeholders in the creation of a major strategy.

Health care process and patient experience

This chapter will help you to analyse the health care process and, in particular, the quality of this process and its outcomes from the patient’s perspective. You will read how you can measure quality from the patient’s perspective, how to interpret the findings, and how to take action based on the results. This chapter provides hands-on guidance with respect to the development and implementation of surveys measuring patient experiences. However, keep in mind that this is only a first step in the quality cycle. The results of such a survey give you a ‘diagnosis’ of the quality of care from the patients’ perspective. It does not really tell you what you should do to improve patient experiences, however. To find effective remedies for negative experiences, often you will have to do additional research.

Funding and delivering health care

This chapter will help you become familiar with different models of funding and delivering health care, and give you some analytical tools to enable you to critically review health system policies in other countries and apply learning to your own context.

Public health in poorer countries

This chapter looks at the broader determinants of health and current approaches to tackling public health in poor countries. Reading this chapter will help you understand the major public health issues among the poor populations of the world, and the approaches used to tackle them.

Translating goals, indicators, and targets into public health action

The objective of this chapter is to help you improve your use of goals, targets and indicators in guiding and informing the choice, implementation, and evaluation of public health action.

Engaging communities in participatory research and action

After reading this chapter you will be able to define participatory research and its core principles, describe how engaging communities in participatory research and action can add value to research, while building community capacity and helping achieve action to promote community health, identify some of the challenges that arise in such work and how they may be addressed, and describe a case study that started with an important issue in the community and demonstrates core principles of CBPR, challenges faced in such work, and subsequent community action for change.

Protecting and promoting health in the workplace

After reading this chapter you will be able to understand the nature and scope of occupational health practice, and how efforts to protect and promote health in the workplace will contribute to general public health.

Environmental health risks

This chapter will help you to understand the environmental health in the rapidly changing context of health protection, the usefulness of having a framework for environmental health risk assessment, and the process of identifying, evaluating, and planning a response to an environmental health threat.