"Good Health is essential to sustained economic and social development and poverty reduction. Access to needed health services is crucial for maintaining and improving health. At the same time, people need to be protected from being pushed into poverty because of the cost of health care." WHO
Hi Marle,
I have myself worked in the India Ministry of Health and can share my experience. A National Public Health System provides several benefits, some important bullet points are highlighted here:
1. Sharing best practices from one region or state to another: Specially benefits a big country like India as there are wide variations in inter-state and intra-state health parameters.
2. Culturally appropriate Behavior Change Communication Strategy: Consider this, in many places it is a common practice to stop breastfeeding when the child is having diarrhea as people believe this will lessen the severity.
3. Enacting Laws related to Public Health e.g. smoking in public places, reduction in air pollution by shifting industries away from highly populated areas, abortion and medical termination of pregnancy, infant baby foods etc.
4. Inter-linkage with social determinants of health e.g. supply of clean drinking water usually handled by Water and Sanitation department, nutrition, education and illiteracy etc.
5. Using cost effective evidence based strategies learnt from Global examples.
6. Maintaining a pool of experts in various domains who can formulate National Level clinical protocols and guidelines along with Training manuals.
7. Example of Smallpox and Polio eradication, drug regulatory agencies, control of abused drugs, maintaining quality of healthcare, fixed allocation of funds on health, preventive screening for early identification of disease/ danger signs etc are issues that can be managed if you an effective National Health System.
Hope these points answer your question.
All the Best!
Manpreet
National Health system is a backbone of any public health activity of any country. No doubt every country has its own unique health care delivery system according to their socio-economic and cultural determinants, but it's playing an important role in the improvement of the health status of the population of that country. Through health system various public health activities and programmes are planned, implemented and evaluated. As every health system involves diverse expertise to prioritize and deal with the country's health problems. The country those has the strong National Health System their sensitive indicators are quite satisfactory.
It is the national health system through which public health packages,programmes,and policies are delivered to the community so depending upon the national health system of the country is the status of health of the people .
As main functions of a health system have been defined as: service delivery, resource generation, financing and management. Without a health system, who is responsible for all these activities.
I do not know any developed country without health care system and health plan (strategy)/ They can be good or insufficient, but it help to organize and finance all this system, especially important for social equity and poor people.
A strong health system is vital to the health of the population. There must be mechanisms in place which support and work inconjunction with public health as Michelle said, a means for service delivery, financing and management. In many developing countries there has been a greater focus on healthcare (treatment of disease) and less of a focus on public health. This chasm has impacted the health of the population. It is time to think more holistically about the health of the population (nation) and bring health care and public health together in a more synergistic manner.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Medicine
- Epi
- Age Groups
- Children