Public health is a diverse field that includes many occupations. Some of these include restaurant inspectors, school health officials, environmental health specialists, epidemiologists, and community planners. Others may work in medicine or health education. The overall work of the field of public health is to research, educate, and provide services to improve people’s lives through prevention of disease and disability.
Each scientific discovery, awareness campaign, or new policy has the potential to impact millions of individuals worldwide. But for this work to be successful, it needs a dedicated public health workforce. In the United States, there are about 5.6 million public health professionals (including some 500,000 physicians and 1.8 million nurses)—a figure that doesn’t include other non-public health workers, such as chemists and food safety experts.
Public health efforts can focus on the entire population or targeted groups within a population. Programs can address social determinants of health such as poverty, housing, and access to care, or specific risk factors like tobacco use, overweight and obesity, and substance misuse. The most effective programs often employ a “technical package” of selected interventions that, when implemented and sustained over time, can achieve substantial and often synergistic improvements in a specific disease outcome or health behavior.