Healthier Fifty Thoughts on the Foundations of Population Health

Fifty essays on the state of population health from a vanguard voice in the field

Public health can rightly claim its share of victories: healthier cities, widespread sanitation, broader availability of nutrient-rich food, and reductions in violence and injury. But for all these gains, today we face a new set of challenges, ones complicated by political and professional shifts that threaten to fundamentally change the health of populations.

Healthier is both an affirmation and an essential summary of the current challenges and opportunities for those working in and around the improvement of population health. The essays contained here champion an approach to health that is consequentialist and rooted in social justice -- an expansion of traditional, quantitatively motivated public health that will both inform and inspire any reader from student to seasoned practitioner.

Galea's cogent, incisive arguments guarantee that his perspective, currently at the forefront of public health, will soon become conventional wisdom.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, is the Robert A. Knox Professor and Dean at the School of Public Health at Boston University. A physician and epidemiologist interested in the social production of health of urban populations, his work explores innovative cells-to-society approaches to population health questions with an overall aim of advancing a consequentialist approach to population health scholarship. He is a past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He is the author or editor of Epidemiology Matters, Population Health Science, and Systems Science and Population Health, all from Oxford University Press.

Acknowledgements

Dedication

1. Introduction

Section 1. The foundations of population health

2. The aspirations and strategies of public health

3. Social justice, public health

4. On mechanisms vs. foundations

5. What health, for whom?

6. Pasteur's quadrant and population health

7. Producing health over a lifetime

8. Shaping values, elevating health

9. Towards a culture of health

10. Paternalism: unavoidable, perhaps desirable

11. At the heart of it all, empathy

12. On courage

Section 2. The world as it is

13. More hate, more harm

14. The burden of incarceration

15. Finding a way out: suicide and the health of populations

16. The heavy toll of substance use

17. The health effects of war

18. Out in the cold

19. Priced out of health

20. When disaster strikes

21. Climate change and our health

22. Reproductive health, reproductive justice

23. Coming to terms with firearms

24. The corrosive role of racism

Section 3. On inequities and the health of marginalized populations

25. On health haves and health have nots

26. Income and health

27. What Flint teaches us

28. Gender equity, almost

29. The well-being of LGBT populations

30. Transgender today

31. The health of immigrants

32. Caring for refugees

Section 4. The challenges faced by public health

33. Population health science-are we doing it wrong?

34. To screen, or not to screen

35. Knowledge and values

36. A step backwards on vaccines

37. Living with complexity

38. Moving beyond "lifestyle"

39. On ignorance

40. Acknowledging luck

Section 5. Towards a healthier world

41. Aging healthy

42. In the heart of the city, health

43. Towards an activist public health

44. Promoting prevention

45. Innovating for a healthier public

46. Who should we talk to, and how?

47. On engaging the media

48. Making the acceptable unacceptable

49. Social movements and the conditions of health

50. Public health as public good

51. A world without public health

Index