Public Health

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Public health is about taking a broad view of society to improve wellbeing and prevent illness.

There are three main areas of public health:

• Health protection – protecting the population’s health by ensuring that environmental risks are minimised. For example, you could work to prevent the outbreak of epidemics, plan responses to emergencies, or in food safety.
• Health improvement – helping people to improve their own health, and therefore preventing illnesses from developing in the first place. You might be involved in campaigns to encourage heathier eating, physical exercise, or to persuade people to quit smoking and drugs.
• Healthcare public health – making sure that everyone has access to the high quality health services and medicines that they need, when they need them. This could be a government or local authority policy role, or humanitarian work in developing countries.

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