A short introduction to the blog, Public Health 360, and Public Health!
Welcome to Public Health 360s blog! Public Health 360 is an organization run by innovative, passionate UNC-Chapel Hill students who aim to spread awareness about public health and pressing issues. Our goal is to create a platform for individuals to have an open discussion and learn about prevalent public health topics. With COVID-19 circulating globally, we believe it is a vital time to help individuals become more cognizant of what public health is and its impact, and provide avenues to discuss and interact with these topics as well as find resources to learn more. Public Health 360 plans to regularly share blog posts, publish podcasts, and provide seminars among other opportunities for individuals to engage and learn more. We hope to bring this space to life with a mixture of personal experiences and real life exposure fused with informative resources and educational tools. Through each post you can see what public health means to us and how awareness, education, and continuous improvement in public health systems can help make our world a better place!
MEET THE TEAM
Hi, I’m Isabella! I’m a current Freshman and one of the Creative Committee Directors. I am interested in infectious diseases, healthcare epidemiology, and I can’t wait to help share these interests with the club!
Hi! My name's Neha and I'm currently a sophomore and the other Co-Creative Director! I am extremely interested in how nutrition plays a vital impact in public health and am super excited to be a part of this club and community!!
Hi, I’m Hanna! Currently, I am a sophomore and so excited to be part of the Public Health 360 team as a blog writer! I am so excited to raise awareness and be a part of this incredible platform to share information about different public health issues!
Hi, I’m Kylie! I’m a current sophomore here at UNC, and I am super interested in environmental health and also epidemiology. I couldn’t be more excited to be joining PH360 as a blog writer and I am looking forward to what this team can accomplish!
What is Public Health?
Public health can be broadly defined as “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private communities, and individuals” (Winslow, 1920). In doing so, public health places a strong emphasis on community by protecting and improving the health of entire populations ranging from a local neighborhood to an entire country or region of the world. Unlike clinical professionals, public health takes a distinct approach to healthcare. Rather than treating individuals after they become sick or injured, public health professionals try to prevent problems from happening or recurring through a variety of different fields.
Public health as a discipline continues to diversify in terms of the fields it encompasses as the need for good healthcare becomes increasingly important. Many of the various fields within public health overlap with other areas of study, bringing more perspectives to the goal of good public health; biostatistics and epidemiology fields have foundations in math and statistics to track trends in population health and disease. Areas such as global health emphasize the need for eliminating health disparities on a large scale across communities, tying in sociological and anthropological research in doing so. Research is also incredibly important in the environmental health field, which explores the effects on public health that certain environmental conditions can have, and in the field of health policy, which investigates how large-scale decisions from health leaders and policymakers influence the health of individuals. While there are numerous other public health fields with just as much diversity as these, all fields of public health prioritize the same goal: protecting human health.
How do we relate to UNC and COVID-19?
As a part of one of the best Public Health institutions in the nation, we are incredibly excited to get to work and make an impact on our community. Of course, we would be remiss if we did not discuss the unfortunate shortcomings of our university during the COVID-19 pandemic. With few regulations in place to prevent group gatherings on and off campus, enforce mask wearing, and conduct testing on the entire student body, it is unsurprising that within a week there were multiple clusters on campus. While this was disappointing in many ways, we hope to use this opportunity to take part in one of the most important parts of Public Health: educating the public. We hope you keep an eye on the blog (and our podcasts coming soon) to stay up to date on the pandemic as well as other important Public Health events that will present themselves in the future.
References:
Winslow CE-Amory. The untilled field of public health. Modern Med. 1920;2:183–91
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