Introduction to Public Health

Explore the definition, mission, history, core functions and essential services of public health, compare it with medicine, and examine partners, determinants, careers, and future pathways.

Public health blends science and art to prevent disease, prolong life, and promote healthy lifestyles through education and research, adopting a proactive, preventative approach.

Trace the history of public health from ancient sanitation to modern achievements, highlighting vaccines, fluoridation, sanitary measures, and key 20th–21st century advances.

Explore public health foundations, from Winslow's enduring definition to the global eradication of smallpox by 1980. Learn how twentieth-century family planning transformed reproductive health through contraception and accessible services.

This lecture reviews the core functions of public health—assessment, policy development, and assurance—and links them to the 10 essential services, including disease surveillance, monitoring health status, and evaluating effectiveness.

Review the core functions and services of public health, including diagnosing health problems, mobilizing community partnerships, evaluating effectiveness and accessibility, assurance of services, and enforcing health laws to protect communities.

Compare public health and clinical medicine by highlighting population focus, disease prevention, and health promotion for communities, versus individual diagnosis, treatment, and care in medicine, and note their collaborative role.

Public health emphasizes disease prevention and health promotion for the whole community, including social justice, while medicine emphasizes diagnosis and treatment for the individual.

Public health partners collaborate with public health to address rising epidemics, develop ideas, and communicate information, expanding reach, influence, and access.

Explore how personal, social, economic, environmental, and biological factors interact to shape health at individual and population levels, including housing, education, and access to care.

Explore diverse public health careers across five core disciplines—Behavioral Science and Health Education, Biostatistics, Environmental Health, Epidemiology, and Health Services Administration—and how policy and environments shape health outcomes.

Address health disparities and unrecognized bias to improve chronic disease prevention and community health education. Strengthen emergency preparedness through surveillance and rapid outbreak response.

Celebrate completing the course and develop a renewed appreciation for public health. You did a great job sticking with it, and congratulations.