Public health as part of public health education:

In our country, public health is mainly taught within medical schools.

The question has arisen as to whether the medical schools are the proper place for this. The important developments in the field of public health world wide, need to be taken into consideration in order to strengthen public health education in our region and country specifically.

1) the interdisciplinary characteristics:
Public health is now bringing medical science, management science, behavioural and social sciences together. Through this we achieve better understanding of the factors that influence health and illness, and also how to change these factors toward better health. We need to stress today the importance of bringing social sciences more strongly into public health to enhance our understanding of how the social environment, including social, economic, cultural and political factors will influence health status.

2) Public health used to focus on describing population health, risk factors and health determinants. Now it is focusing more on interventions which can improve public health. Such interventions are focusing on questions that need to be addressed within the specification of a particular society. Such questions would focuson how to change smoking behaviour, changing policy on reproductive health and how to influence health sector reform.

3) Obtaining knowledge from the community:
The relationship of public health to the community is taking the form of partnership to all levels. This is achieved through bringing community knowledge into solutions developed to address the public health problems.

4) Public health is becoming more evidence based, which is preferred in public health practice regimens collaborative research efforts by interdisciplinary teams.

From the above overview, in addition to the consideration of the basic principles of APHA definition of Public Health, we can conclude that medical schools cannot be considered as ideal in dealing with all Public Health issues.

The solutionis providing specific schools of Public Health but keeping in mind the important links with medical schools.

Disciplines such as epidemiology, biometry, population health behaviour and social sciences, health management and policy could all be encompassed under the schools of Public Health.

The collaboration with other disciplines can be achieved through schools of Public Health by having linkages with medicine, environmental sciences, economics, sociology, engineering, agriculture science, business and others.

This is what we need in fact which will help in dotting the is and crossing the ts.This is what we need to assist in providing a comprehensive public health policy.