Public Health Local and Global Perspectives

Public health practice involves protecting the public from ill-health and promoting conditions that help people to live healthy lives. Public health agencies, usually government-led, set and implement wide-ranging policies in populations or communities, with a view to reducing disease or mental or physical ill-health. The scope of public health work is vast but it generally involves making decisions about what matters, including about the goals of the public health enterprise and the outcomes to be sought. For that reason, along with being a ‘science and art’, public health is also a political and social exercise. It is largely those political and social aspects of public health that are the focus of this chapter. That is because we introduce ways of thinking about and justifying public health practice that all, at their core, hinge on the value judgements people make about what is important. We describe what public health ethics is, introduce three of the most widely used approaches in framing public health problems and solutions, and present some ethics frameworks that may be helpful to practitioners of public health.