Public health is the governmental infrastructure that provides citizens with vital services such as vaccination, ambulance, and disease prevention. It includes multiple departments, laboratories, workforce, and social institutions dedicated to improving people’s well-being and has various benefits for the whole nation. Firstly, public health organizations promote proper lifestyles and receive funding to study the current circumstances and trends for the diseases. Secondly, the ability to timely recognize upcoming challenges helps avoid them, and healthy habits encouraged performed by the infrastructure in other governmental institutions like education builds a healthier nation. Lastly, crucial information about citizens’ health conditions is applied during economic, political, and legislative reorganizations.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the foundational public health infrastructure of the United States. HHS (2021) states that the mission is “to enhance all Americans’ health by providing effective services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.” While private medicine is widespread among U.S. citizens, federal infrastructure is a more significant player due to the range of responsibilities and opportunities it includes. Indeed, when a disease expands among the citizens, the infrastructure can rapidly receive proper funding and workforce to help the affected.
The U.S. public health infrastructure is solid because it includes multiple institutions located in every state and provides each citizen with essential services. However, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the demand for revising the departments’ performance and efficiency as the preventative measures were not helpful enough to avoid making the United States a country with the most disease cases (World Health Organization, 2021). While the most developed states have a better structure of public health services, rural ones might not provide the essentials such as a professional workforce and medicaments availability (Maani & Galea, 2020). The responsible departments and facilities require more funding as the issues caused by the lack of financing are a matter of economic security and cost-effectiveness (Maani & Galea, 2020). Restructuration is necessary for public health infrastructure as its solidity is not enough to keep the nation healthy and respond to challenging diseases.
References
Maani, N., & Galea, S. (2020). COVID-19 and underinvestment in the public health infrastructure of the United States. The Milbank Quarterly, 98(2). Web.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2021). About HHS. Web.
World Health Organization. (2021). COVID-19: The United States of America situation. Web.