The interdisciplinarity that U. El Bosque offers in the Master’s degree in Public Health gives its graduates proactive capacity in various fields.
Photo: Carlos Rosas – Mauricio Alvarado Lozada
Public health is a branch of medicine that seeks, through different strategies and interventions, to summon the participation of society and institutions in all the actions that can be carried out to promote health and prevent diseases, always bearing in mind that public health encompasses individual and collective issues that in some way feed off each other.
“Within the framework of our social security system in health, public health is conceived as a set of policies, actions, and strategies that seek to guarantee, in an integrated manner, the health of the population and the community through multiple actions. or interventions, which encompass both the individual and the collective, seeking to generate an impact on the determinants that contribute to the population enjoying a better state of health and a better quality of life, so that this affects the development of the country”, explained Rafael Miranda, director and professor in the master’s Public Health of El Bosque University.
And although it may sound very general, there are different definitions or criteria with which it can be established whether an event or disease is of public health interest or not. In global terms, a public health problem is a situation that negatively affects the well-being of the population, both individually and collectively. And it must be analyzed from different attributes such as the magnitude of the event, lethality, transmission mechanism, the impact on a vulnerable group, including the health system, if there are treatments or intervention options, since there is no single criterion to determine that something is of particular interest.
According to Dr. Miranda, the historical moment also influences whether an event or illness enters the agenda of public health. “Now we go from covid to reach monkeypox, so not everything that causes high mortality is an event of interest. Another example might be orphan diseases, which are also of interest, because they imply a high additional cost to the system.
What is sought: that this event be prioritized and receive particular attention, within the entire group of situations or health conditions that are taking place at the time.
Similarly, understanding that the public health It is not only limited to health promotion and disease prevention activities, it makes this discipline conform to an interdisciplinary field of knowledge and becomes a social practice; for this the Forest University works for the Public health be it through collaborative work, which will improve population health”, highlighted the professional.
This interdisciplinarity and utility in various fields allow public health to have many applications. A health graduate from the Forest University it is in the capacity to carry out the diagnosis, evaluation and analysis of health situations; manage and lead projects, carry out research, work on risk and damage control, as well as promote activities and strategies that link the community to strengthen institutional capacity, which guarantees the reduction of gaps to the maximum.
Likewise, it must be recognized that the country’s challenges in public health are many, and to improve health services, policies must be developed, institutions and information systems strengthened, among others. The Forest University promotes in its graduates the proactive capacity, in terms of strategies, technologies and appropriate methodologies that allow a more comprehensive and real response to health problems in the community.
Thus, one of the great challenges presented by the public health it is to be able to establish dialogues and mechanisms that allow solving problems that affect the individual and collective. Issues such as abortion, the use of psychoactive substances or teenage pregnancy must be part of the public health agenda, in order to reach definitive solutions that ensure the well-being and rights of people.
Topics like the abortion they must be understood as a public health problem, but the view must be understood beyond the practice of unsafe abortion, which leads to infections and mortality. Therefore, it is up to us to also include and analyze everything related to sexuality, contraception, early pregnancies and unplanned motherhood.
“That already brings a more social, economic and family connotation, which is not only exclusive to the health sector,” said Miranda, who stressed that, “in this particular case, there is also a lot of resistance to abortion from the health sector, because in medicine they do not teach how to face death, because the mission is to save lives. A life is also saved here, but there are many prejudices involved; then, it is there where that dialogue through public health It should be able to further facilitate that these situations do not reach the point as serious as deaths due to unsafe abortion practices.”