PHE2PHP Principles of Health Practice-Promoting Public Health

Answer:

An analysis of the association between healthcare concepts and their influence on patient

    Involvement with a particular focus on equity and participation in the healthcare sector

Public health is a government’s effort to keep its population healthy using a combination of programs, policies, and services. Two of the priority areas that are useful in promoting public health include; taking action to enhance equity and widening participation in decision-making, policy-making, and implementation. This paper will discuss equity and involvement in the Australian healthcare context and also elaborate on how the concepts of primary care, primary health care, population health, and health promotion integrate equity and participation in decision making, implementation, assessment and resource allocation.

Primary care refers to the first point of contact individuals have with the health system and primarily relates to day to day healthcare of non-admitted persons (Bodenheimer, 2002). Examples of primary care include health maintenance, counseling, treatment of acute and chronic illnesses. Health inequalities persist between the upper and lowest socio-economic individual classes in Australia. In the country’s health system, primary care and primary health care achieve health equity through the provision of patient focused broad care, disease prevention with greater continuity and organization (Starfield et al., 2005). Achieving health equity requires the adoption of a primary care and primary health care strategy of lessening inequity in a variety of health domains.

The Australian health sector can combine a patient-centered health approach with a framework that aims to reduce health inequality through quality improvement. Health inequalities stem from complex structures operating at national and local level. According to the Commission on Social Determinants of health (2008), any serious effort to enhance well-being, reduce inequalities, and prevent ill-health must tackle the social determinants that determine the way people live, grow, work, as well as age which eventually impacts their health. The civil society Australia ought to begin by empowering individuals and population subgroups through improvement in psychosocial resources, political voice, and material conditions.

According to Hall & Taylor (2003) the Alma-Ata declaration, the participation of individuals in scheduling and executing their healthcare was acknowledged as a human right. Community engagement forms the foundation for primary healthcare given that reputed benefits such as improved health outcomes and equity. One of the lessons learned from community involvement in the post-Alma-Ata experience is that it is not useful to or possible to have a unanimously recognized meaning of community involvement. The second lesson learned is that it is unmanageable to develop public self-sustaining community involvement through activities in the health services sector alone. The third lesson is that it is hard to reflect on community contribution outside a political context. The fourth lesson is that it is impractical to propose a model for managing community participation within health programs.

Community involvement in primary health care is the active contribution of local societies through community development procedures that result in community empowerment to tackle health issues within an excellent model of the social determinants of well-being (Morgan, 2001). Community-based Organizations play a fundamental role in responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Recent estimates of the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Kenya to range amid 6.3% and 7.4% (Riehman et al., 2013). Key indicators on the reporting system focused on medication, transmission modes, and prevention. The study came to the conclusion that higher community-based organization has an impact on behavior and knowledge that affects the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Hence, in communities where CBOs engage in prevention efforts the level of education and awareness is higher hence a lower risk of sexual behaviors. Primary caregivers play a significant role in engaging patients during therapy. For example, a general practitioner may find that a client needs specialized treatment. Continuity is a fundamental feature of primary care because patients prefer to consult a single physician unlike in continuity of primary healthcare where it is non-existent given that a specialist or primary caregiver is trained to tackle health problems in a particular field of medicine (Keleher, 2001).

Population health is a method that elaborates on a range of elements that affect the health of an entire community as a response to bridging the health inequality gaps that exist in different societies. One of the similarities between public health and health promotion is that both focus on numbers in the workforce capability and capacity. Nutbeam et al., (2010) explicates that sufficiently trained caregivers perform different roles in ensuring that patients receive quality healthcare. By implementing health promotion programs, the skilled workforce can work together in enhancing population health and fostering provision of quality healthcare to different persons. The availability of quality health care for various health populations translates into equity in the health sector (Kickbusch, 2003).

A Finally, health promotion according to the OCHP is a strategic tool for eradicating health inequality which provides an individual enabling process aimed at increasing people’s influence on their healthcare (Maller et al., 2006). The Ottawa Charter for Healthcare Promotion (OCHP) depicts that achieving health population requires effective integration of health promotion and both primary care and primary health care practitioners. Another similarity is identifiable in the fact that both health promotion and community health draw their meaning from the idea that informed choices by society result in improved clinical outcomes.  Public health officials use the health promotion emblem which involves the building of a healthy public policy and later combining it with the health intervention strategies as per population health management hence enabling providers to deal with the social, economic problems in the healthcare delivery system. The health promotion emblem as explained in the OCHP employs policies that encourage community participation such as strengthening community actions, developing personal skills, and creating supportive environments which encourage patient involvement and subsequently improving decision making, implementation, and evaluation of treatment procedures.

In conclusion, using the OCHP, it is possible to identify the relationships between health concepts in the healthcare delivery system. Based on the four concepts analyzed in this paper, one can draw the conclusion that both primary care and primary health care focus on individual health success while both population health and health promotion produce higher levels of patient engagement since their main focus is community health success. Healthcare equality gets recognized as working towards the provision of quality healthcare to community members.

References

Bodenheimer, T., Wagner, E. H., & Grumbach, K. (2002). Improving primary care for patients with chronic illness. Jama, 288(14), 1775-1779.

Commission on Social Determinants of Health. (2008). Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health: final report of the commission on social determinants of health.

Hall, J. J., & Taylor, R. (2003). Health for all beyond 2000: the demise of the Alma-Ata Declaration and primary health care in developing countries. Medical Journal of Australia, 178(1), 17-20.

Keleher, H. (2001). Why primary health care offers a more comprehensive approach to tackling health inequities than primary care. Australian journal of primary health, 7(2), 57-61.

Kickbusch, I. (2003). The contribution of the World Health Organization to a new public health and health promotion. American journal of public health, 93(3), 383-388.

Maller, C., Townsend, M., Pryor, A., Brown, P., & St Leger, L. (2006). Healthy nature healthy people:‘contact with nature’as an upstream health promotion intervention for populations. Health promotion international, 21(1), 45-54.

Morgan, L. M. (2001). Community participation in health: perpetual allure, persistent challenge. Health policy and planning, 16(3), 221-230.

Nutbeam, D., Harris, E., & Wise, W. (2010). Theory in a nutshell: a practical guide to health promotion theories (pp. no-no). McGraw-Hill.

Riehman, K. S., Kakietek, J., Manteuffel, B. A., Rodriguez-Garcia, R., Bonnel, R., N'Jie, N. D., ... & Fruh, J. (2013). Evaluating the effects of community-based organization engagement on HIV and AIDS-related risk behavior in Kenya. AIDS care, 25(sup1), S67-S77.

Starfield, B., Shi, L., & Macinko, J. (2005). Contribution of primary care to health systems and health. Milbank quarterly, 83(3), 457-502.