Health Care and Public Health

Jaume Orfila^*
*Correspondence: Jaume Orfila, Department of Public Health Administration, University of Buckingham, Bermuda, Tel: 7653218901, Email:

Editorial

Health care and public health are considered to be two different disciplines, but they're natural allies. Healthcare cures individuals, addressing the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and public health focuses populations handling promotion and prevention, taking under consideration the behavioural, social and economic determinants of health consistent with a recent definition, public health is “use of theory, experience and evidence derived through the population sciences to enhance health of the population”. Public health has always been an evolving domain encompassing health promotion, health education and medicine. Health care need to be considered as part and parcel of public health programmes with an ultimate objective of yielding populationwide benefits a transparent dearth of integration of the presents a dreary picture of health indicators of the developing world, particularly in most parts of South Asia.

Over the years, this misunderstanding of the notions and an excessive amount of ‘medicalization’ of health has given rise to large gaps and disparities in terms of health status among different groups, even within the same geographical area. Although all the pledges of the international community and therefore the states are geared towards building a healthy public policy and reorienting health services, the resource allocation in curative services in South Asian countries has been too heavy compared with preventive and promotive actions. Despite global gains in child survival since 1990, significant discrepancies remain within and across countries and regions, and 11 million children still die needlessly annually. Why then does the state of maternal and child health remain abysmally fragile in South Asia and South East Asia? Whilst conceiving programmes for maternal and child health care, the elemental problems with gender equity, human development and programmatic sustainability have always been side-lined. Ironically, health professionals would also keep health care and public health disconnected. As a result of this demarcation, the whole health system is seen to be divided into two within the present scenario, the ‘medicine perspective’ has its entire accent on biomedical reasoning of the disease process, and there's a significant dearth of consideration of other causes of the ill-health process. As a result, social, economic, cultural, political and environmental determinants of health and health-seeking behaviour are very often overlooked by the health.