Category Archives: Public Health

In my mind, it is a subset of Global Health, often more locally focused.

Covid Economics

“Governments will not be able to minimise both deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the economic impact of viral spread.” [Anderson et al.]

A soup kitchen during the Great Depression. Apparently it was only men who were hungry

It is easy to see that the economies of the world are being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Share-markets have tumbled. Airlines are flying empty. Except for bizarre panic buying of toilet paper, malls and shops are more deserted. And if you have an employer with a large cash reserve and a bit of heart, you will be OK. There are many companies, however, that are at the margins and they are already failing because of the impact of COVID-19. Households are hunkering down: not spending, not going out.

These are the consequences of containment.

Now think about the daily wagers and piece workers, the sex workers, couriers, garbage pickers, rickshaw drivers and maids. Who will pay their bills, put food on their tables and ensure the same for their children?

Workplaces are instituting attendance rules based on health guidelines. Fevers, coughs, headaches and myalgia? Stay home! Recently been with someone who tested positive. Stay home! Etcetera.  That’s fine for me. I will apply for sick leave. In all countries, but disproportionately in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, large numbers of people in the workforce are in the informal sector. They are vulnerable. Even in the formal sector, many workers have no financial protection.

Think again about the daily wagers and piece workers, the sex workers and couriers. Their capacity to pay the bills and keep food on the table is proportional to their capacity to keep working. No matter what.

Death is not everything.

The obligation of countries who have committed to sustainable development goals is to “leave no one behind”. Governments should implement their public health measures to limit the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the poor should not have to carry an unfair burden.

A street sweeper in Mokhali

The “underserved” are “undeserved”

I hate the phrase, “the underserved”. I would love to remove it from the lexicon of public health. But it appears to be here to stay, particularly in North America where there is even a journal devoted to them.

A girl with kwashiorkor during the Nigerian-Biafran War (Public Domain; Wikipedia).

On a number of occasions in public lectures I have played with the phrase using a comparison of the “undeserved” and the “underserved”. It usually takes listeners a few minutes to work out that I am not repeating myself over and over again. And if you thought I had typed the same thing twice, look again. “underserved”≠”undeserved”.

My spell-checker knows the difference. It tells me that “underserved” is a spelling error and I almost certainly mean “undeserved”, and herein lies the problem. It is not simply that these two words look and sound similar, it is that there is an unpleasant semantic connection between them. It seems to depend where you lie on the political spectrum which term you use to refer to the same group of people.

On the left, the powerless and the left-behind, those with poor access to services and care would be characterised as the underserved. On the right of politics (or a nationalist left where refugees and migrants are vilified) anyone in need, the powerless and the left-behind, those with poor access to services and care are more typically characterised as the undeserved. The same people, the same need, and the same suffering, but a more or less generous view of our social obligations.

 

Potential living-donors should have no choice

I recently learned three interesting and disturbing facts. First, I have a distant, 5 year old relative with liver failure. He will be dead within weeks unless a suitable liver donor is found. Second the lobe from a living adult’s liver can be used to save his life. Third, I am a match. I learned these things when I was received notification from the National Transplant Registry. They also informed me when the surgery will take place, when I am to arrive at the hospital, and that I have no choice. I will be donating a lobe of my liver. It was the first time I knew about any of this.

Unless you have no choice about being the means to someone else’s ends.

Apparently my life is my own, except when it isn’t. The life of my young relative is so precious, so important, that my wishes are of no consequence. I am the vessel for his survival. I am the means to his ends but not to my own.

You can imagine how outraged I feel. I don’t feel outrage about his need, but about my lack of agency — my lack of control over my own body.

This is, of course, nonsense. Hyperbole if you like. There is no transplant registry in the world that can mandate surgery; there is no country in the world where one person’s body is just the means for supporting the life of another.

Unless you are a woman.

All over the world, as a matter of law, women are obliged to make their bodies available as the means to another’s end. In many countries, to withdraw the service is a criminal offence, resulting, in substantial jail terms. We call this protecting the right to life. They call it an unwanted pregnancy.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states inter alia that “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.” I am the means to my own ends and I can choose when to be the means to another’s ends. Being held in servitude is being forced, for however limited a duration, to be the means to another’s ends. It is a rights violation whether it is a requirement to give up a part of your liver to save another, or to provide rental space in your abdomen.

Public Health is not a specialisation of medicine

Medicine saves lives one at a time. Public Health saves lives by the millions.

In many countries, the guilds of the medical fraternity provide for specialist membership. Attached to membership is prestige, promotion, and increased earning potential. In almost all cases, membership or fellowship of one of these guilds, typically titled “Colleges”, indicates increased expertise in the management of classes of disease in individual patients.

If you have diabetes, atrial fibrillation, Parkinson’s disease, major depression, etc., or you need more or less specialised surgery, you may well want to consult a member of one of these guilds of medicine.

 

Vaccination programs are critical to Public Health, but they do not require a medical specialisation in Public Health. [Image source: pixnio.com]

The focus of Public Health is the protection and improvement of the health of populations. The breadth of public health practice is enormous with individuals working in disease specific areas (e.g., HIV, TB, or mental health); settings (e.g., schools, workplaces, markets); social policy areas of the social determinants of health; health systems; health financing and market regulation; urban design; and health data analytics, to name just a few. Although there are commonalities between them, Public Health may be contrasted with Community Medicine and Social Medicine by the fact that Public Health practitioners do not spend their time treating individual patients, although they may guide services for the better and more efficient treatment of populations of patients.

The most significant distinction is that Public Health draws its expertise from a wide range of disciplines: behavioural sciences, nursing, management, geography, history, politics, anthropology, environmental sciences, urban planning, sociology, pharmacy, economics, biostatistics, microbiology, ecology, mathematics, parasitology, computer science, entomology, engineering, veterinary science, … and medicine. Some of the best public health people I have ever worked with have come from history and geography. It is not that history and geography are peculiarly crucial to Public Health. It is that good Public Health requires interdisciplinary teams that can bring new perspectives to problems. It is relatively unusual to find historians and geographers in Public Health, so they bring novel solutions that are quite different from those one might otherwise see.

Postgraduate Public Health training, such as a Masters of Public Health (MPH), is a useful way of providing the diverse disciplines involved in Public Health a common language with which to share problems, ideas, and solutions. There is no one best discipline for Public Health, and there is no reason that one has to study Public Health formally to make a valuable contribution to Public Health practice. I speak here as a person who has no formal qualification in Public Health but one who has been a Professor of Public Health, has lead Public Health teams, and has advised governments, UN agencies and international NGOs on Public Health.

I return to my titular point. Public Health benefits enormously from the input of people with a diverse range of qualifications. What then is the purpose of a medical specialisation in Public Health, if Public Health is not a branch of medicine?

The answer is historical and political. The historical answer is that Public Health is traditionally located within the Ministry of Health (MOH). There is a logic to this. So much of the practice of Public Health is about the coordination, regulation and efficient delivery of health services that it must be coordinated with MOH activities. The obvious down-side of this historical location of Public Health is that, as it has become increasingly evident that population health problems require whole of government approaches, any attempts to transcend the departmental pillars of government are regarded by other Ministries as a MOH power-grab.

Politically, power within MOH is typically vested in people with membership in one of the specialist guilds of medicine. The only way for Public Health to have status in MOH (and let’s face it, Public Health has never been as sexy as clinical medicine) is for it to be lead by people with a medical qualification and membership of a specialist guild. Thus, specialist guilds of Public Health medicine were born.

This historical and political strategy protected the status of Public Health within MOH. It provided a career pathway for medically qualified personnel interested in pursuing a career in Public Health. Unfortunately, it also limited the capacity of Public Health practice to deliver the best population health outcomes.

Governments need to improve the way they approach the protection, promotion and improvement of the health of their populations. A good start is to recognise that medicine is a part of the practice of Public Health (just as history, geography, etc. are), but Public Health is much bigger than a specialisation of medicine.