The Public Health Approach

This book contains 4 chapters that discuss in the context of both the One Health concept and the SDG initiative, remote sensing can provide solutions to the priority of assessing and monitoring public health risks, and it can play an important role in supporting decision making to reduce health risks within our shared ecosystems. The growing awareness of complex but causal interactions among these realms has motivated professionals in a wide range of sectors to adopt the One Health approach, which promotes intersectoral collaboration to address health issues at the human-animal-environment interface. In its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations specifically identifies strengthening the capacity of all countries in particular developing countries for early warning risk reduction and management of national and global health risks" as part of their Good Health and Well-being Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). As examples presented in this book reveal the risk of infectious disease emergence increases with a wide range of conditions and variables including those associated with humans animals climate and the environment.

This book applies a multi-disciplinary lens to examine obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that results from prolonged, obstructed labor. While obstetric fistula can be prevented with emergency obstetric care, it continues to occur primarily in resource-limited settings. In this volume, specialists in the anthropological, psychological, public health, and biomedical disciplines, as well as health policy experts and representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations discuss a scoping overview on obstetric fistula, including prevention, treatment, and reducing stigma for survivors.

This book calls for a re-conceptualisation of the public health evidence-base to include crucial forms of creative and relational data about people’s lived experiences that cannot be accessed through the biomedical approach to generating and using evidence.

Students and researchers in the health sciences are faced with greater opportunity and challenge than ever before. The opportunity stems from the explosion in publicly available data that simultaneously informs and inspires new avenues of investigation. The challenge is that the analytic tools required go far beyond the standard methods and models of basic statistics. This textbook aims to equip health care researchers with the most important elements of a modern health analytics toolkit, drawing from the fields of statistics, health econometrics, and data science.