The Role of Public Health in Health and Social Care

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN HEALTH AND SOCIAL
CARE

Table of Contents

Introduction
Public health refers to a large area of health care and it includes protection of public from
dangerous diseases, handling inequalities of health in various communities and giving
support to people to make healthy choices. In the UK, healthcare centres, the government
and people of different communities need to work with each other effectively in order to
improve the condition of health and wellbeing of public. Proper health care services should
be provided to common people to eliminate different types of infectious and non-infectious
diseases properly. The aim of the study is to understand the role of public health in health
care in the UK. In the first section, various techniques and strategies are evaluated that are
used to measure and control diseases in different communities, in the second section,
various implications of different diseases and illness of communities are understood and in
the last section, different factors have analysed that influence the well-being and health of
the public. In Public Health England, I work as an epidemiologist and I have the
responsibility of creating a report based on the epidemiology of various diseases of the UK.
Task 1
Analysing various strategies and approaches that are used to
measure, review and control diseases in different communities
1.1 Describing the roles of various agencies that are used to
identify different levels of disease and health in communities
In the UK, various agencies such as local authorities, health trusts, the government,
commissioning groups, third sector, Public Health England, World Health Organisation play
important roles in health care services. The authority that is responsible for implementing
health activities is called National Health Service. The chief governor has the responsibility
of taking decisions related to health care activities in the UK. He is the Secretary of state
regarding all issues of health. Every governing body and department come under the
responsibility of the Secretary. He creates guidelines and gives orders to all the authorities
regarding new researches, procedures, policies related to management of disease and drug
management. The health department has the responsibility to set the action plan and
implement health policies and to work for the betterment of public health (Brett et al. 2014,
p.640). One category of National Health Service is primary care unit that takes care of public

health in case of emergency. There are many health professionals including opticians,
dentist, general practitioners and dentists who play significant roles in providing health
services to the public. Another one is the secondary care unit, which is considered a
significant sector of health service.
The role of the UK government is extremely important as well. They take initiatives and
conduct programmes in order to make people aware of negative aspects of various
dangerous diseases. If people visit official health websites of the government, they will be
able to gather enough information related various diseases and treatment.
World Health Organisation is a well-known international organisation, which is concerning
with public health of different countries. The role of WHO is to monitor health trends and
health situation of various countries including the UK (Biehl and Petryna, 2013, p.40). It also
gives leadership in certain matters that are crucial to health and gets involved in partnership
if joint action is required. WHO also determines standards, norms and promote
implementation.
In the UK, Public Health England is a health care agency, which is concerned with the public
health of that country. The role of the agency is to improve the health of the public by
promoting discussions related to health care and providing support to the action of NHS, the
UK government and other health organisations. It also provides health assistance to the
public, so that they can improve and protect their condition of health. The agency
researches, analyses and collects data in order to make improvement related to the
understanding of healthcare.
The agencies do have the surveillance for the timely investigation and the identification of
the data required for managing the public health response to the outbreak or terrorist event.
Surveillance uses health related data, which signal the sufficient probability of case or the
outbreak, which warrants further public health response.
The increase in the movement of people, and increased population, all are changing
the environment of the nature. Due to this movement of people from one place to another,
there is a rapid growth in the number of disease. The main objective of any government is to
prevent the disease from entering and causing the damage to their citizens. In many
countries, the main concern is to detect the disease and stop them from spreading, and
reducing the impact on trade and tourism.
WHO is the world health organization, working in UK to address the problem
regarding any diseases. This agency is monitoring the occurrence of diseases by using
different formal source of getting the information as well as the informal sources of finding
out the information. The formal source include different institute and hospitals where the
treatment can be done on such kind of disease. There are different communities and
research centres working in reducing the effects of different diseases. Informal sources