I often found myself feeling that I wished I could do more for my patients. In a sense, I found clinical medicine to be somewhat limited in this aspect. We focused on the here and now, pre-emptively made plans for the future and we did our best, but it simply was not enough.
Surely there was more that could have been done to prevent this?
Surely there was more that we could do?
I often felt in practice that what I did treatment wise accounted for little in terms of overall quality of life and health. My patients backgrounds, education levels, financial, environmental and social issues played a far more important role in determining this. The Social Determinants of Health shows that while medical care is important – it only accounts for about 10-20% of what factors into a persons overall health. Which just goes to show how incredibly important public health is.
While recognition of the importance of public health is on the rise, there are still a lot of people who do not really understand what it encompasses. And hopefully I will make that clearer in my posts to come.
365 days of public health 