The Six Pillars Of Public Health Study

The primary pillars of public health include three core functions. They are assessment, policy development and assurance. These core functions differ from medicine in several ways. Additionally, there are six disciplines within the realm of public health that aid in achieving these core functions. The six disciplines are epidemiology, statistics, biomedical sciences, environmental health sciences, social and behavioral sciences, and health policy and management.

The core functions are cyclical in nature and begin with assessment. Assessment in essence defines the needs of the community and involves identifying and analyzing public health risks. By continually monitoring the health of a community we can diagnose and investigate causes of public health risk (Schneider, 2016). Once we assess and identify a public health risk, we move to the core function of policy development. At this stage the function of public health is to inform and educate our patient population. This function also includes mobilizing community partnerships, and core policy development. (Turnock, 2012). Assurance is the final core function and encompasses enforcing policy development and laws, providing care, and finally evaluating the

First, public health serves the community as its patient population, while medicine serves the individual. Next, medicine is rooted in medical science, while public health is rooted in public health science (which includes the six disciplines). In order to treat the community, public health must create new policies. One very key difference between medicine and public health is their primary goal. In medicine the goal is to cure. In public health the goal is to prevent. While life expectancy has increased nearly 30 years in the twentieth century, only 5 of those years are the result of medicine, yet only 3% of health spending goes toward public health (CDC,