Ministry of Health
Public Health in B.C.
What is Public Health?
Public health plays a wide variety of valuable roles in British Columbia. These roles include:
- Ensuring British Columbians are provided with access to safe drinking water and food supplies;
- Developing and delivering provincial-wide vaccination programs;
- Assessing, analyzing and reporting on the health status of British Columbians;
- Managing communicable disease outbreaks; and
- Encouraging healthy behaviours to prevent chronic diseases and injuries.
Like many high-income countries, Canada has publicly-funded health care, which means that our overall health care system is funded by taxpayers’ dollars. As a result, the term “public health” is often confused with publicly funded and administered health care systems, when, in fact, the term that is most used to describe our country’s overall healthcare system is actually “universal healthcare”.
Simply put, the role of public health is to protect and promote the health and well-being of British Columbians.
Important values in public health include:
- Commitment to equality, social justice and sustainable development;
- Recognition of the importance of the health of the community as well as the individual; and
- Respect for diversity, self-determination, empowerment and community participation.
Public health officials include doctors, nurses, public health inspectors, nutritionists, dental hygienists, vision screening technologists, mental health and addictions specialists, and a wide variety of other healthcare professionals.
Together, they draw upon their diverse sets of skills and knowledge to determine and positively influence the many factors that impact our health. These factors, known as determinants of health, include:
- Income and social status
- Social support networks
- Education and literacy
- Employment/working conditions
- Social environments
- Physical environments
- Personal health practices and coping skills
- Healthy child development
- Biology and genetics
- Health services, gender and culture
The health of a population, whether it be a small community or an entire province, is determined not only by these broad factors but also by other key determinants of health such as physical, social, economic, and cultural environments.
Improving the health of any given population in British Columbia is referred to as population health. Population health helps to determine the many factors, such as chronic disease, that influence the health of a population, identify the various reasons why some populations are healthier than others, and use that information to develop and implement policies and actions aimed at improving the health and well-being of those populations experiencing health challenges.
In fact, while modern clinical medicine is critical, public health is largely responsible for a 25-year increase in life expectancy across industrialized nations in the 20th century (Naylor, 2003). With so many factors affecting public health, including the re-emergence and emergence of infectious diseases, increasing awareness about health inequalities, chronic conditions associated with our aging population, and health effects linked to environmental factors, such as pollution, today strong public health leadership is more important than ever.
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