Introduction

This course, Introducing public health, uses several activities to introduce two important public health issues: factors that influence health and ill-health; and the scope of public health work.

• Factors influencing health, or the ‘wider determinants of health and ill-health’ as they are often called, are complex and contested. Family circumstances, poverty, education, work, housing, and environment all impact our health to some extent.
• Public health has become ‘everybody’s business’ and is undertaken by a wide range of people, not just in the health sector but in other sectors too. It is both ‘multi-professional’ – involving professionals such as police, teachers, housing officers as well as health workers – and ‘inter-sectoral’ – involving different government departments, local government, the voluntary sector, private sector and so on.

Course learning outcomes