Public health initiatives handled by professionals address broad public health issues affecting the health and well-being of individuals, populations, communities and societies across the world.

Importance of Public Health

The Public Healthcare Sector protects all sectors of the economy from hazards like infectious disease outbreaks and natural disasters. The major health issues include environmental hazards, infectious diseases like HIV/AIDs, drug abuse, alcohol and tobacco-induced illnesses, malnutrition, sedentary lifestyles, etc. Environmental, occupational or social conditions are responsible for Stroke, Coronary heart disease, Diabetes and certain cancers that have been found to respond to public health interventions. Public health activities can control or eliminate morbidity and mortality associated with some of these chronic diseases. These issues are addressed by the public health system through improvement in transportation services, outreach of various programmes and culturally sensitive provision of services. Wider implementation of public health principles like preventive therapy, hygiene, sanitation anduniversal health coveragecan reduce the spread of infections and bolster the resilience in the population.
Public health protects against dangers and improves the community health through health education, research and policy making for prevention of disease and injury. Public Health science deals with public health safety, promotes healthy behaviours and improves the quality of life of a population through detection and prevention of diseases and other mental or physical health conditions. Experts in Public health intend to inform people to have a healthy life and protect them against any health related threats. The goal of public health professionals is to organize measures towards prevention of disease, promotion of health and prolongation of life in the whole population.

Leadership in Public health

The field of public health leadership in a community or organization relates to the ability of an individual to influence, motivate and contribute towards a healthy population. Leadership involves inspiring professionals to craft and achieve a goal or vision by policy development, management and communication skills within the public health systems for effective coalition building. It also includes influential contributions and management of public health workforce required in reducing morbidity and mortality of specific diseases with collective sector-based facilitation of strategic discussions. Leaders passion, vision and influence are important to transform and eliminate inadequacy in the medical care delivery system to be more effective in the future.
Public health departments and organizations have implemented and improved various ways of understanding, identifying and developing means to meet the needs of the workforce.Values of evidence-based decision-making skills and courage to initiate change in individual, organizational and political behaviour are needed in a leader. These futuristic leaders in health systems must have a vision that maximizes the clinical and management approaches or contributions in public health. The education system should be able to train these passionate and driven leaders to create and improve the health system of the nation. There are leadership programs designed to build collaborative leadership skills and ensure excellence in personal growth in public health leaders of the next generation. These programs can help develop communication and assessment skills, build competency for an effective public health leader to analyze situations for cogent solutions to public health problems. Such programs nurture characteristics of an effective leader to enforce organizational change and handle nuanced public health issues. The skills of public policy development, system thinking and program-building for ensuring effective public health solutions to complex issues while accounting the diverse populations are targeted in these programs.

Online course in public health leadership

James Lind Institute (JLI) provides an online program – Master in Public Health (MPH)& Executive Certificate in Public Health Leadership & Research for developing more leaders in public health. JLI also provides focused programs in reproductive health, environmental health, occupational and safety management, tropical medicine, public health research, clinical trial management, drug safety, nutrition and dietetics, infectious diseases and many more.
For more information please visit: www.jliedu.com