What is Public Health and Why Does it Matter?
This article will share the top five reasons I think public health is an essential and rewarding career path.
By Samantha Bockoven — October 3, 2022
I first became interested in public health after a tenth-grade trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the Fall of 2012. My father, a Pediatric Cardiologist, screened children with congenital heart defects to see if they were eligible to come to the United States for life-saving surgeries they did not have access to in their country. While there, I wandered around the hospital. I often found myself in the abandoned children's ward. In this ward, I came across numerous children with Hydrocephalus.
Their heads were giant with built-up cerebrospinal fluid, but without access to proper medical treatment, they were waiting to die. I saw a little boy who had no eyes. His eyes were missing because he was born blind, and his parents had no idea how to raise a blind child, so he scratched his eyeballs. I also saw a girl with rheumatic fever, which developed because she had strep throat, which could not be properly treated due to the lack of resources. She would die that night, and the next morning after a quick church service, we carried her, along with two other children, out to a graveyard in three cardboard coffins.
It struck me that although medical professionals could diagnose all these conditions, these children still had negative outcomes because their community did not have the proper resources and funds to help them. Since then, I have studied public health and learned how much public health interventions could help individuals and communities like those in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This article will share the top five reasons I think public health is an essential and rewarding career path.
Improve the Health of your Community
Public health focuses on the health of a whole population or community, not just an individual person. One way to focus on the community's health is to identify what causes the population to be sick. Is there a high prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer? What makes these diseases so prevalent in the community, and how can they be prevented? Public health specialists can use the answers to these questions to develop targeted interventions and education programs to help the community fight against their biggest killers. This can create a population that is overall healthier with better outcomes and longer life expectancies. That means by getting a public health degree, you can make a direct, positive impact on the community you live in.
Looking at Healthcare as a Whole
The World Health Organization defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Public health workers understand they need to look further than just the acute medical needs of an individual. To assure the individual achieves true health, they must ask the question: what barriers stand in the way of this individual receiving health care? Does the individual have transportation to their doctor's appointment and access to childcare?
If the individual has a prescription, do they have the money to pay for the medication? Does this person have access to a place to sleep outside the medical office with working utilities like heat and running water? Is this place safe from abuse and violence? Can this person access healthy, nutritious food? Can this individual properly take care of their hygiene, or do they not have the ability to acquire hygiene products? All these questions and more are critical in making sure an individual can truly reach their full health potential. By working in public health, you can look at a person as a complex individual-with different physical, mental, geographic, and social needs-to provide help completely.
A Way to Advocate for Marginalized Populations
Our healthcare system is immensely complex and complicated. The system focuses more on making money than on an individual's health. Some people get left out of the narrative and are disproportionally affected, leading to adverse health effects. Those who work in Public Health understand that healthcare is a human right everyone should have access. The field of public health aims to close the inequality gap. Public health interventions not only include people of all ages, genders, socio-economic backgrounds, etc., but they also focus on marginalized groups that get left behind. Through community interventions, education, campaigns, and working to influence government policies, public health workers are essential in helping amplify the voices of those most marginalized in society.
Culture and Diversity
I enjoy learning about people and what makes us all unique. My public health degree has allowed me to meet people all over the United States who come from a wide array of backgrounds. Not only that, but my degree has also allowed me to expand my viewpoint even further by allowing me to travel all over the world. This past year I worked with Haitian, Afghan, Ukrainian, and Mongolian populations. Working a career in public health enables you to brush shoulders with people who might have a different background than you.
So Many Job Opportunities
A degree in public health has a broad scope of applications. With the skills you gain, you can have careers in biostatistics and epidemiology, disaster health and emergency preparedness, environmental health, health policy and administration, health promotion and education, international health, and social and behavioral science. This degree makes it easy to find a job encompassing various interests and passions.
Samantha Bockoven
Samantha Bockoven graduated from Villanova University in 2019 with a degree in Peace and Justice and a minor in Global Health. She went on to get her master’s in public health with a concentration in disaster health and emergency preparedness. Since then, she has worked in a variety of public health jobs in the United States and around the world.
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