Much has been said about the health of this country’s population, the burden of cost to the Government and the need to improve health outcomes. However, little has been mentioned about the public health workforce, who are expected to find solutions and create healthier communities.
We must not lose sight of the importance of the public health industry. We must pay close attention to public health education if we want to improve the well-being of the nation.
The 2014 report Healthcare for All: Building a Public Health Workforce to Achieve the UAE 2021 Vision for Health states that more than 30 health professional groupings make up the existing workforce. The majority of those are “licensed” professions.
Public health education is important for producing professionals trained in disease prevention and management, reducing the number of persons needing treatment and increasing the number of people who can live without treatment.
In other words, we need public health professionals to play an integral role in helping the Government reduce the burden of healthcare cost.
We must prepare public health professionals to be trained in identifying epidemic, endemic and pandemic disease patterns.
We must prepare public health professionals to identify behaviour models and cultural and other differences that impede the success of health promotions programmes.
We must prepare public health professionals to address health care reform.
We must produce human resources to monitor and draw conclusions about what, where, who, why and how chronic diseases develop and linger in spite of state-of-the-art treatment programmes. This requires development and research.
We have very few people trained in public health to fill the gap in human resource capacity for public health.
Many positions are filled with people trained in clinical medicine who have worked very hard to become qualified doctors, pharmacists and dentists.
Since these types of degrees rarely include studies in epidemiology, behavioural models, public health policy, health management, biostatistics and environmental health, we need to rebalance our public health workforce. Licensed clinical professionals alone are not sufficient to solve the problems we read about in newspapers every week, regarding the health of the nation.
We need public health trained professionals.
The UAE has placed the continued development of health services as an essential priority to help achieve the UAE Vision 2021.
Therefore legislation to increase public health education and expand the number of people trained in critical areas such as epidemiology, behavioural health, biostatistics and research methods with an emphasis on community based participatory research and public health policy is important in achieving the vision.
In particular, encouraging Emiratis to enter the field of public health – and to see the value in its contribution to the sustainability of the nation – will be of great importance.
A variety of public health licensed professions are targeted by students entering college, but it is important to promote non-licensed public health education, as in the areas mentioned earlier.
An epidemiologist can produce information critical to the Government in addressing morbidity and mortality, while a public health specialist focusing on behaviour models may be of great advantage to, for instance, a health insurance company, designing health promotion programmes.
A biostatistician is always needed when developing meaningful research to find out what is going on with the health of a community, and when we want to get a good analysis of why people use health care as much as they do.
A behavioural public health professional can help in the design of effective interventions to reduce the number of people who become ill based on behaviour. It is not easy to change the behaviour of a population.
A large focus has been placed on nutrition and understanding the reason why people do what they do. It is not as simple as creating a programme to eat healthier, or to eliminate things that are not good for a person.
Understanding the behaviour that prompts people to do what they do is also important to the doctor who may be frustrated because their patients are not showing improvements. Medical school does not focus on behavioural public health; it is focused on treatment after a person has already made their choice.
Making public health education an attractive field is imperative to attract more Emiratis to study in this area. It is essential to balancing out the workforce, and improving the practice of health care.
Dr Ludmilla Wikkeling Scott is an assistant professor of public health and environmental sciences and sustainability at Zayed University
On Twitter@DrLudmillaFWS