Policy and Issues in Public Health Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Policy and Issues in Public Health - Article Example This journey had witnessed an evolution, and government involvement in active policy making is attempting to harvest the fruit of current knowledge in this area. The most important paradigm shift has perhaps resulted from the increased emphasis on the role and contribution of individual behaviour and lifestyles to disease causation. Consequently, the public health programmes follow the policies and strategies to modify them at the community level, where both population and individual interventions are being increasingly practiced. Obviously, there would be sociopolitical critiques of such policies. Eventually, enhanced research leading to greater understanding of different factors on specific public health problems has revealed that socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors may influence health-related behaviour and thus may affect health status (Hunter, 2002). Public health policy relates to several areas of intervention. The health administration and planning processes must recognise these levels since resource allocation would depend on the gravity and level of the problem. Community health and health protection is an important level that deals with people in their social and environmental contexts. It is now known that people's health is determined by not only personal characteristics, biological and genetic endowments, but also environmental influences of physical nature. Some of these influences originate in the community and work through the influence on their behaviour and coping strategies. In the context of the current UK public health scenario, the government is demonstrative of its anxiety to fulfill its commitment to preventative health through different public health policy agenda. Hunter (2005) has indicated that public health and related policies are of central importance. One of the reasons for this growing interest in pub lic health and community intervention strategies is the new knowledge that many preventable chronic diseases, due to lack of definitive public health policies have assumed epidemic proportions. Moreover, these diseases once established would add up to the mounting costs in healthcare services. This led to the need of change of approach towards prevention of these diseases and health improvement of the population. Strong et al. (2005) stated that a low-budget preventive approach would balance the resource allocation in such a manner that the healthcare cost demands might be managed more effectively, and absence of preventative strategies would lead to demise of publicly funded health systems. Although it may appear from this statement that public health interventions and policy changes have brought about the desired changes, in reality there exists a widening gap between the need of chronic disease prevention measures and government responses of implementation. This indicates there a re needs of specific action plans and rigorous implementation measures against these problems (Strong et al. 2005). All these are indicative of the fact that during the second half of the twentieth