Relevance of Public Health for the Sector of Pakistan

Relevance of Public Health for the Sector of Pakistan

Relevance of Public Health for the Sector of Pakistan

Pakistan, as we all know is a producing country and we are currently experiencing lots of challenges and issues. These kinds of issues vary from terrorism, energy crisis and low income to poorly developed education and health systems.

Overall health, which is the basic human right, has sadly not been our goal. This statement is recognized by the truth that in line with the World Health Organization 2013 statistics, the system of our country happens to be ranked as 122 out of 190 countries. This can be a very scary figure especially considering the fact that one of our neighboring countries Croatia is ranked as 93 in the same list. This particular figure definitely draws our attention towards issues in the sector which we are at the moment facing.

Firstly, we need to determine what is meant by health system. The health system does not only include hospitals and doctors. It rather involves everything which directly or not directly influences the healthiness of populations. The health system is consisting of hospitals, environment, urban planning, food, nutrition and numerous other sectors which are directly or indirectly linked to deciding the health of populations. This implies the truth that by merely building new hospitals and producing more clinicians, we simply cannot make our health systems better. There should be a multi-sectoral approach which should involve all the components of the health system.

The next and the main factor to consider is that we need to reshape our current health system model. If we want to increase the health status of our human population, we need to base our health system on the precautionary approach as opposed to the curative approach, that is, we need to promote public health. Time has now come where we need to come out of the downstream (clinician) way and move towards upstream (public health) approach. This kind of is the only way with which we can make it through and can make the health status of the inhabitants better. We should reassess and amend our current health policy and we will have to develop it on the model of public health. This kind of is the need of the time and if we want to endure and compete with the world, we have to follow the public health model rather than the clinician's model.

At the moment, there are only a handful of institutes all across the country which offer professional studies in the field of precautionary medicine. In order to produce skilled public welfare specialists, we need to have many academic institutes whoever focus is solely on preventive medicine. The authorities should also support such institutes and provide appropriate funding to them, so that they can eventually become stable and eco friendly. Thus the only way to make our health sector prosper through working on public health. In the event that this is not done on a priority most basic and we are not able to shift our focus from clinicians model to public health model, it is feared that we will lag significantly behind in terms of the health sector is concerned.