Heightening Awareness and Modifying Health Behavior

What is the Area for Action that you feel is most important for public health preparedness?

Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) should involve a complete range of activities aiming at recovery, mitigation, and prevention activities, not just those designed to allow for responses to events. PHEP also includes operational capabilities. This refers to the ability to quickly execution of tasks on preparedness. Although having the ability for the quickly execution of tasks preparedness requires capacity (such as plans, personnel, and infrastructure), capacity in itself is not a guarantee for ensuring readiness. PHEP requires continuous improvement, such as testing for plans through exercise and drills as well as action plan formulation and implementation. Additionally, PHEP also involves the practice of improving community resiliency and health (Murthy et al., 2017). In all these steps, I feel that continuous improvement is the most critical part of PHEP and specifically in the government working locally on issues that are global.

Why might each of the other dimensions be slightly less important?

In acting locally, the government will need continuous quality improvement. A country is only as healthy as its least healthy population group. When a particular health problem ravages many of the populace, the government is forced to divert critical funding and taxpayers’ money to handle the challenge. This is also true when the health challenge is on a global scale, such as is the case with diabetes, obesity, and the more recent Covid-19 (Haffajee & Mello, 2020). Additionally, a government such as the US government also gleans from past lessons of healthcare challenges and uses lessons learned in coping with current situations. This last aspect calls for refining of the lessons learned, that is, continuous quality improvement.

Although the term QI was originally made for manufacturing, methods in QI have been applicable in improving quality and performance in the emergency response, engineering, and healthcare sectors though not so much so in the healthcare industry. According to Mensah et al. (2018), the continuous efforts of QI should be going because the system and processes often change and require the four elements: reporting and feedback, QI practices, performance measures, and performance goals. In this case, for every global health issue, the US needs to improve on its QI as regards preparedness for future re-occurrence of the health challenge.

Learning from other nations is also a critical step for the US, taking second place in the order of importance. More specifically, learning how another country combats a healthcare challenge and, better still, how to avoid the challenge occurring in the US is of importance. However, this is not always applicable, especially in cases where the health challenge is constrained by external factors such as climate and cultural factors. For example, an outbreak of highland malaria that kills millions of people in tropical countries may not so much compel the US to take preparedness measures as the disease is practically non-existent in cold climate areas. Investing in global initiatives by the government of the US holds some level of weight, as in doing so, the US protects itself by investing in other nations. According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division (2017), “Money spent on improvements to infrastructure, workforce training, and response systems—both in the United States and abroad—protects Americans from threats such as emerging infectious diseases or bioterror attacks.” In my opinion, these occurrences are substantially rare, and hence their importance level is lower. The least in my list of importance is the sensitization of health practitioners on global health status. This is because the world has become a global village, with the internet allowing for the easy flow of information from one corner of the world to another. Health practitioners can easily access information as regards any health challenge through the vast network created by the global internet village.

References

Haffajee, R. L., & Mello, M. M. (2020). Thinking globally, acting locally—The US response to COVID-19. New England Journal of Medicine.

Mensah Abrampah, N., Syed, S. B., Hirschhorn, L. R., Nambiar, B., Iqbal, U., Garcia-Elorrio, E., … & Kelley, E. (2018). Quality improvement and emerging global health priorities. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 30(suppl_1), 5-9.

Murthy, B. P., Molinari, N. A. M., LeBlanc, T. T., Vagi, S. J., & Avchen, R. N. (2017). Progress in public health emergency preparedness—United States, 2001–2016. American Journal of public health, 107(S2), S180-S185.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Global Health; Committee on Global Health and the Future of the United States. Global Health and the Future Role of the United States. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); (2017 May 15). 2, Investing in Global Health for America. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK458469/

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Heightening Awareness and Modifying Health Behavior

Module 4 – Case

Case Assignment

Read the module Home page and required readings. Read through this assignment, instructions, and the Assignment Expectations.

Heightening Awareness and Modifying Health Behavior

In her commentary, “The Global Dimensions of Public Health Preparedness and Implications for US Action,” Moore (2012) points out that Public Health is truly a global issue; and she discusses what that means for us here in the US in terms of our need for preparedness. She suggests four areas for action: 1) sensitize practitioners to the global nature of diseases, 2) learn from the success of other countries, 3) US Investment in Global Health, and 4) acting locally on global issues.

Instructions

Your assignment is to write an essay in which you select the single area that you feel to be the most important for public health preparedness. Justify your position.

You can submit your paper in a Question and Answer format. In other words, list the questions and provide a short answer to each.

• What is the Area for Action that you feel is most important for public health preparedness? (Please write 1 paragraph maximum here)
  • Hint: you will need to conduct your own scholarly research for information on the topic. For example, enter The Online Library and enter search terms, such as “Public Health Preparedness.” Be sure to check the box to limit your search to full-text access.
• Why might each of the other dimensions be slightly less important? Be sure to cite sources rather than simply stating your opini