The field of public health draws from the skills, experiences, and talents from a variety of professional and trained individuals to execute the following:
10 Essential Public Health Services:
- Monitor health status to identify community health problems
- Diagnose and investigate health problems in the community
- Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues
- Mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems
- Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts
- Enforce laws that protect health and ensure safety
- Link people to needed personal health services and ensure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable.
- Assure a competent public health and personal health care workforce
- Evaluate personal and population based health services
- Research for new solutions to health problems
The former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop summed up the importance of public health: “Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all of the time.”
