Public health is our lifeblood, and everyone has a unique experience. This lifeline is not a fantasy idea, but a turbulent picture drawn by having society in mind, waving the flag and shouting, and doing things with physical strength.
About 100 years ago, Peking Union Medical College and the Beijing Normal Police Department jointly established a public health office, and then Mr. Chen Zhiqian and other teachers and students of Peking Union Medical College participated in Mr. Yan Yangchu's Dingxian experiment, which integrated statistical epidemic prevention, environmental sanitation, daily health care, health care and health education, and used local human and material resources to solve the basic health needs of the public.
Based on China's experience, in 1978, representatives from 134 countries and international organizations such as the World Health Organization collectively adopted the Alma-Ata Declaration advocating primary health care, which clearly stated that primary health care is the key and basic way to achieve the goal of "health for all by 2000".
Primary health care includes, at a minimum:1Educate and educate on current health issues and prevention and control methods;2.Improve food ** to ensure nutrition;3.Safe drinking water and basic sanitation;4.Maternal and child health care;5.Immunization against major infectious diseases;6.Prevention and control of endemic diseases;7.Proper management of common illnesses and injuries and provision of essential medicines. Some developing countries are beginning to take new paths that they have designed, explored and achieved positive results.
Public health needs to heal the rifts. Public health is inherently interdisciplinary, and it is indeed a "white coat and clenched fist" undertaking. It not only integrates multidisciplinary research and practice, but also integrates clinical individuals and social groups, extending from thinking in the study to improving in society, and is the best way to improve human health.
Public health is distinctly public and open, committed to breaking down disciplinary barriers, and does not allow the calculation of enclosing research fields into individual research territories. Professor Hu Dayi, a cardiovascular disease expert, believes that sitting in the hall to practice medicine and waiting for people to get sick is a pale and powerless passive, fragmented and broken medical service chain, which may lead to the disorderly and rapid growth of medical costs.
The value of bridging the rift is to make up for this shortcoming, prompting us to re-examine and discover ways to promote physical health, make full use of the resources available to us, and maximize the long-term health benefits from the perspective of individual to group medicine from prevention, diagnosis, control, etc., to understand the needs and problems of patients, understand human nature, and achieve a state of physical and mental health.
Although this concept is new, its application is not new. In the 90s of the 20th century, the Department of Epidemiology of Peking Union Medical College successively established two urban and rural public health field teaching bases in Dongcheng District and Tongxian County, Beijing, and carried out public health field work for medical students. Let medical students understand the health resources and functions of urban and rural health care networks from the level of districts, sub-district offices, residents' committees (urban areas) and counties, townships and villages (rural areas), and learn to carry out disease control (prevention and treatment of chronic diseases, infectious diseases and occupational diseases), maternal and child and elderly health care, health supervision and management and health promotion in Xi, especially the prevention and treatment of common diseases and infectious diseases in rural areasPromote students to participate in investigation and research, initially grasp the basic principles and methods of disease control and health promotion in the community, understand what is the concept of group, community and prevention, and form a complete idea of disease control, that is, to solve the problem of managing the sky and the earth, that is, to manage the air, that is, to ignore the crux of people.
Therefore, to realize the concept of a healthy China, we should not only use basic and clinical medical knowledge to diagnose and improve diseases, but also interpret the relationship between individuals and social environments for the occurrence and development of diseases from the perspectives of public health knowledge, social science methods and humanities, and prevent and promote common diseases and serious diseases and frequent diseases with high morbidity and mortality.
Public health professionals go deep into the field and fight on the front line of disease prevention and control, all directed to serving the people. Serving the public is the norm of public health;Caring for the vulnerable is a public health imperative;Taking root at the grassroots level and eating, living and working with the public at the grassroots level is a compulsory course for every public health worker, and it is also a tempering of personal character.
Over the past decades, China has controlled epidemics such as schistosomiasis and smallpox, eliminated polio epidemics, taken the lead in eradicating filariasis in the world, met the World Health Organization's standards for the elimination of neonatal tetanus, basically eliminated key endemic diseases such as Keshan disease and large bone joint disease, and the average life expectancy of residents has risen from 35 years before the founding of the People's Republic of China to nearly 80 years, and the maternal mortality rate and infant mortality rate have decreased significantly.
For a populous country like ours, these are world-renowned and brilliant public health innovations, from the "sick man of East Asia" to the healthy China, several generations have made hard efforts, touching and majestic. Behind these achievements have always been settled souls whom we have never met, but whom we have met and admired through articles, letters, and friends. Telling everyone's public health journey brings together the well-being of the nation, the country, and human progress.
Excerpted from "Public Health: A Narrative Shift from the Individual to the Group", originally published in the Journal of Medical Science, by Konglai Zhang.