How does epidemiology helps in researching and addressing population health challenges?
NUR 550 Population Health Assignment

NUR550 Translation Research and Population Health Management

Week 4 Discussion

DQ1 How does epidemiology helps in researching and addressing population health challenges? Provide a specific contemporary example.

DQ2 Research a health concern that impacts a population with which you are familiar. How do biostatistics affect the research focus? How do you define the population as your patient? Make sure to include the population and health concern.

NUR 550 Population Health Discussion
NUR 550 Population Health Discussion

What is an example of population health?
Examples of population health improvement include renovating public housing to help with the control of asthma, building a supermarket in a “food desert,” establishing a pro bono system to provide specialty care to the uninsured, etc.

What is the concept of population health?
Population health refers to the health status and health outcomes within a group of people rather than considering the health of one person at a time. For public health practitioners, improving population health involves understanding and optimizing the health of a population broadly defined by geography.

What are the 4 components of population health?
4 components of a successful population health initiative
Emphasis on primary care. …
Careful data driven environment. …
Physician leadership. …
Off–the-radar disease management.

Population health is defined as the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group. (3,4) These groups are often geographic populations such as nations or communities, but can also be other groups such as employees, ethnic groups, disabled persons, prisoners, or any other defined group. The health outcomes of such groups are of relevance to policy makers in both the public and private sectors.

Note that population health is not just the overall health of a population but also includes the distribution of health. Overall health could be quite high if the majority of the population is relatively healthy—even though a minority of the population is much less healthy. Ideally such differences would be eliminated or at least substantially reduced.

NUR 550 Population Health Assignment

The right hand side of the figure indicates that there are many health determinants or factors, such as medical care systems, individual behavior, genetics, the social environment, and the physical environment. Each of these determinants has a biological impact on individual and population health outcomes.
NUR 550 Population Health Discussion
Isn’t this so broad to include everything?

Population health, as defined above, has been critiqued as being so broad as to include everything—and therefore not very useful in guiding specific research or policy. The truth is, no one in the public or private sectors currently has responsibility for overall health improvement. Policy managers, for example, tend to have responsibility for a single sector while advocacy groups likewise focus on a single disease or factor.

The inherent value of a population health perspective is that it facilitates integration of knowledge across the many factors that influence health and health outcomes. For population health research, specific investigations into a single factor, outcome measure, or policy intervention are relevant, and may even be critical in some cases–but they should be recognized as only a part and not the whole.

NUR 550 Population Health Discussion

What is the difference between population health and public health?

The distinction between public health and population health deserves attention since it has been at times both confusing and even divisive. Traditionally, public health has been understood by many to be the critical functions of state and local public health departments such as preventing epidemics, containing environmental hazards, and encouraging healthy behaviors.

NUR 550 Population Health Assignment

The broader current definition of the public health system offered by the Institute of Medicine reaches beyond this narrow governmental view. Its report, The Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century, calls for significant movement in “building a new generation of intersectoral partnerships that draw on the perspectives and resources of diverse communities and actively engage them in health action (5).”

However, much of U.S. governmental public health activity does not have such a broad mandate even in its “assurance” functions, since major population health determinants like health care, education, and income remain outside public health authority and responsibility. Similarly, current resources provide inadequate support for traditional–let alone emerging–public health functions. Yet for those who define public health as the “health of the public,” there is little difference from the population health framework of this blog.

ORDER NOW FOR AN ORIGINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT: NUR 550 Population Health Assignment
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.