This qualitative study aimed to explore primary health care professionals' views on community development, and to identify the opportunities and barriers associated with using this approach in practice. Participants in community development training--mainly health visitors--took part in small group discussions before, after, and six months following the training course. Opportunities for using ...

Countries in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) lack enough public health workforces to address their poor public health situation. Recently, there have been efforts to develop capacity building in public health in these countries by producing competent public health workforce through public health institutes and schools. Considering the wide nature of public health, the p...

The base paper by Petrakova and Sadana is a thoughtprovoking call for innovation and action in public health education. The approach used by the BRAC University James P Grant School of Public Health (BSPH) in Bangladesh addresses many of these issues. To be relevant to the needs of society, we envision our graduates to: be committed to the health needs of the global South; • be equipped to deal...

The integration of public health practices with federal health care for American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) largely derives from three major factors: the sovereign nature of AI/AN tribes, the sociocultural characteristics exhibited by the tribes, and that AI/ANs are distinct populations residing in defined geographic areas. The earliest services consisted of smallpox vaccination to a f...

The importance of establishing and sustaining academic-public health practice linkages has been a point of emphasis in the Institute of Medicine reports on public health in 1988 and in 2003. One likely barrier to fostering such linkages is the absence of a clear framework that matches academic requirements to practice realities. This article describes how an academic-public health practice coll...

Narratives have become an increasingly common health communication tool in recent years. Vivid, engaging writing can help audiences identify with storytellers and understand health messages, but few public health practitioners are trained to create such stories. A transdisciplinary perspective, informed by both creative writing advice and evidence-based public health practices, can help public ...

Traditionally, public health professionals have scorned hospitals as the antithesis of community health. Secondary care remains notably distant from public health practice and policy. Yet hospitals consume over 50 per cent of the health budget and over a quarter of the population have contact with hospital services every year. There is an important public health agenda in hospitals for promotin...

The field of public health services and systems research (PHSSR) has emerged over the past decade to produce the evidence needed to address critical uncertainties about how best to organize, finance, and deliver effective public health strategies to all Americans. To advance these efforts, a national PHSSR research agenda-setting process was used to identify a broad inventory of information nee...