Importance of General Practitioners in Public Health
Close analysis over the healthcare strategies and care techniques adopted by the healthcare industry of the nation of UK has revealed the role of primary care to be one of the best medium of healthy life management. General practice as well as the GPs also called general practitioners is seen to form the building blocks of public health. The special relationship associated with the General practitioners and their service delivery in primary care and public health activities is considered to be one of the most important approach in treating citizens and giving them good quality life (Liu et al. 2017). They are provided with the responsibility of providing first line medical care and thereby promote the health as well as well-being of the patients and therefore, it has remained the most accessed part of the English healthcare systems (Roberts et al. 2016).
Few years back even, an individualistic as well as medicalised system of primary medical care was followed extensively by the general practitioners. However, recent day researchers have argued that, as the general practitioners are the professionals who have the capability to meet with patients more than thrice each year, they get the excellent opportunities to discuss healthy living with the patients. Thereby they help in early detection as well as early prevention of the illness that patients are vulnerable to (Gibson et al. 2015). For many years, general practitioners were seen to be more comfortable in managing illness than promoting help but trends are gradually changing when professionals have become more proactive in preventing illness and promoting good health. Some of the activities that are nowadays conducted by the primary care professionals are actively encouraging risk avoidance as well as healthy choices for patients. This could be in the form of motivating for physical activity, encouraging breasts feeding and many others (Paul et al. 2015). They are also seen to be identifying high-risk groups or population and providing preventive intervention like advising over smoking, alcohol consumption, unsafe sexual practices and many others. They are also at the same time seen to be prescribing treatments for those individuals who are diagnosed with illness for preventing further complications.
There are three types of approach that can be allocated under the discussion of healthcare and ill health prevention technique. The first one is the primary prevention technique. This approach to healthcare is mainly seen to comprise of activities that are typically designed for reduction of various instances of an illness in the population through education and prevention. This approach is therefore found to be very helpful in the reduction of the risk of new cases that are appearing and thereby reducing their duration. This can be simplified with an example. The mass childhood immunisation also called the MCI programme has successfully been able to seek control on the eradication, elimination as well as containment of various disorders. In the present generation, there are about 13 routine immunisations for boys and 14 routine immunisations for girls (Jolly et al. 2015). There are also two other non-routine immunisations and the current practices have been quite successful as well. The health department has also supported the programmes and put forward NICE guidelines. These would help the professionals as well as their teams to provide better care to the nation. They have suggested professionals to b up to date on Department of Health guidance, adopting a multifaceted as well as coordinated immunisation program. They are also advised to undergo training of their communication skills, able to answer all answers and queries regarding vaccines, improve rates for all groups (Winbald et al. 2016). They are also advised to support those with transport, communication or language difficulties and those with, physical and learning abilities.
Types of Healthcare Approaches
Another important approach is the secondary prevention. This approach is mainly seen to comprise of activities that remain mainly aimed at detection and treatment of different pre-symptomatic diseases. This approach is also preventative in nature and the identification of the disorders is mainly done through screening and detection following which interventions are usually taken (Stubb et al. 2015). One of the most important examples that can be witnessed here is the smoking prevalence programs. The department of Health had been successful in initiating a smoking cessation service also called SCs in the year 2000 (Jolly et al. 2015). This program has till then been adopted in different healthcare centres to save people and provide them with high quality lives through detection and subsequent solutions.. These programs are seen to be offered outside or within the GP practice settings. Within the Gp mediated healthcare centres, it is seen that the GPs employ their own staffs or are seen to fund external stiffs to carry out these practices. NICE has also provided importance to smoking cessation programmes. They have come forward with a number of guidelines that are requested for every healthcare professional to follow as well as to ensure successful health promotion campaigns. This includes the brief interventions as well as referral of smoking cessation in the different primary care as well as other settings (not GP) after successfully screening the patients (Carney et al. 2018). They also influence workplace screening programs and recognising individuals who requires interventions and thereby helps in for the promotion of smoking cessations. They also influence the smoking cessation services in the primary care, local authorities and workplaces, pharmacies, pregnant women, manual working groups as well as hard to reach communities through screening and identifying the exposed groups (Prince et al. 2015). They have also provided guidance to prevent uptake of smoking habits for growing children, school based interventions for prevention of smoking among children and interventions to stop smoking in pregnancy and after childbirth. Schools are also screened excessively to identify the habits of children and modify them accordingly.
Tertiary prevention is another approach that is mainly remedial in nature seen to comprise of activities that are aimed at the reduction of the incidences of chronic incapacity as well as recurrences in a population (Tolemi et al. 2016). This approach mainly helps to reduce the functional consequences of an illness by including therapy, rehabilitation techniques as well as interventions that are designed in such a way that it helps the patients in various ways. They help the patient to come back to family, educational, social, professional as well as cultural life (Vancampfort et al. 2015).
Primary Prevention
Palliative care approach is also another form of approach that are mainly seen to aim for the improvement of the quality of lives of those individuals who are suffering from different life limiting illness. This approach mainly takes place through the reduction of their suffering through the early identification as well as assessment and treatment for pain, physical, psychological, cultural, social as well as spiritual needs (Bauer et al. 2014). One important aspect of this form of treatment is that this approach does not try to make patients overcome the symptoms. It only supports individuals in a way by which they are able to lead better quality lives in their end days (VelSoz et al. 2015).
In order to shed light on the link between the prevalence of the diseases and requirements of service care, one can take the topic of health needs assessment. It can be described as an essential tool that helps in informing the commissioning as well as service planning and ultimately helps in the systematic method of identification of the unmet healthcare needs of population and making changes to meet the needs (Nolen Hoeksema et al. 2015). Therefore, it becomes extremely important for the healthcare professionals to identify the specific disorder resulting in the poor quality lives of people and the frequent by which it is affecting a particular cohort of the population. This group of population whose needs are not met may not be only based on age or gender but may be also based on geographical areas, particular racial background and any others (Tolemi et al. 2016). Identifying such groups and the percentage of people being affected is call the prevalence that in turn helps to identify the health care needs required by that population.
Prevalence of the diseases can be defined as the proportion or the faction of people out o the total population who are affected by a specific disorder. Determination of the prevalence rate is found to be extremely helpful as it helps in supporting the professionals in the different health and social care settings for effective identification of the health care needs and thereby planning interventions and resources accordingly to meet the healthcare needs of the people (Bauer et al. 2014). This could be described with the help of two different types of example. One of the first examples is that there is increase prevalence of drinking and driving cases of adolescents and the nation that had resulted in loss of huge number of lives. These would help the professionals to understand that the adolescent in the particular cohort of the population where the accidents due to drinking and driving are high in comparison to other cohorts. Therefore, the professionals would set the priorities as such where they would mainly be developing health promotion sessions in ways by which they can target the adolescents and help them overcome tendencies of such habits and lifestyles (Stubb et al. 2015). Another example can also be provided here. The prevalence of cholera is seen to be quite higher in western region than the other regions of the nation. This would help the professionals to identify the population who are exposed to the microorganisms and hence care priority would be set that would align with the needs of the nation. In this ways, studying of the prevalence helps professionals to develop ideas about the healthcare needs of the people and develop strategies and interventions accordingly.
Secondary Prevention
A framework can be proposed by which the healthcare professionals can use the prevalence of the disorders in undertaking health needs assessments. The first step is called getting started. In this step geography, social experience, illness and others would identify the population. Key stakeholders would be identified and following this, resources should be identified that are required for handling the situation. The next step is called the identification of the care priorities (Bhatnagar et al. 2014). This involves gathering qualitative as well as quantitative data describing the population of interest. This can be analysed to get a detailed picture of the health needs and many a times, professionals are also seen to collect data on similar other localities to allow comparisons of need. The next step would be called the identification of the priorities of change. This stage mainly helps professionals to identify which of the issues identified are most important and should be set as priority following which actions would be taken. Priorities should be set on the size and severity impact. It also depends on the availability of effective as well acceptable interventions and actions. Priorities would be based on local commissioning priorities as well as partnership arrangements (Haller et al. 2015). The last step would be mainly incorporating steps that mainly involve the implementation of the changes, developing a monitoring as well as evaluation strategy and measuring the impact of changes in the service. Thereby with the proper knowledge of the prevalence, one can conduct the health need assessment successfully and thereby develop proper interventions.
The planning spiral is one a model where the entire planning, implementation and evaluation of health campaigns get their guidance and framework to follow. The important part that aligns with the topic of the discussion is the situation analysis that paves the pathway of effective health promotion planning. This step is called situation analysis and it mainly comprises of six important parts. The first one is analysis of the current and projected demographic characteristic if the population, physical as well as socioeconomic characteristics of the area and is infrastructure, analysis of the policy and political environment including existing policies and many others (Tyler et al. 2015). The others are analysing the health needs of the population, services provided by non-health sectors as well as health sector and examination of resources in the provision of the services and many others. All these help in designing the requirements of the service including analysis of the current efficiency, equity, effectiveness and quality. The next step would be developing the health promotion committee that would comprise of healthcare professionals with different types of expertise. Healthcare educators, dieticians, community registered nurses, physicians, specialists, therapists, epidemiologist, researchers and all other would come together with their specific job role and expertise so that they can meet the needs and requirement of the population groups who are exposed to healthcare risks (VelSoz et al. 2015). All of them should work together in partnership along with policy makers, representative of the healthcare department of the government, legislative authorities so that they can not only advocate for the vulnerable group of the population but also can brainstorm together and helping in overcoming the issues through effective partnership (Nolen Hoeksema et al. 2015). For health promotion planning and successful implementation, funding is also required. Therefore, healthcare activists should advocate for proper funding, the governmental departments of healthcare should ensure smooth flow of resources, and funding so that the healthcare campaigns and preventive measure for treatments can be encouraged in different parts of United Kingdom and development of proper facilities for citizens of the nation can be ensured.
Tertiary Prevention
Health is multi-factorial as well as complex and therefore it is often seen to be influenced by a number of things like that of age, family history of illness, employment, education as well as living conditions. Often individuals are seen to go through a variety of lifestyles as well as health related habits that have major impacts on the health of the person. Different types of behavioural as well as social issues that are seen to negatively affect health are the smoking tobacco, alcohol consumption, poor diet leading to obesity as well as malnutrition, improper sexual behaviour, lack of physical exercise as well as problems that take place due to taking of drugs. Researchers are of the opinion that one of the most important lifestyle choices that affects health is improper diet intake and imbalanced nutrition. In the present generation, besides personal preferences of many individuals, many individuals have take calorigenic fast food or takeaways food due to their busy professional lives (VelSoz et al. 2015). There are many situations where individuals like to have buy-in foods or ready to eat food. All such food is high on calories and result in huge accumulation of calories within the body. Individuals are seen to gain weight that results them in going through a chronic condition of obesity. Obesity is often seen to accompany many different types of co-morbid situations life cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, arthritis, sleep apnoea, depression, and many others. Again, on the other hand, many individuals are anorexic and often go through long periods without having good nutritious food. The recent trend of body image maintenance has made many adolescents and young people to take lifestyle choices that result them to malnutrition and many other symptoms. These make them suffer from various non-communicable disorders like anaemia, night blindness, and lack of energy and development of fatigue, poor physiological symptoms and many others (Gormac et al. 2015). Therefore, proper health education about the importance of balanced diet is needed to help individuals develop proper lifestyle habits.. Another important lifestyle factor that matters a lot is proper physical activity. Most of the individuals work in offices in a sitting position throughout the day that give them very little scope of physical activities. Moreover, the use of gazettes and electronic media n the present generation had made life sessile for the individuals make them uptake very few physical activities. Children are also seen to spend time indoors on tablets and video games. Such lifestyle choices make them gain weight that creates many health disorders. Smoking issues are also a habit that is also associated with a number of disorders. This includes different forms of heart diseases, high cholesterol, weakened immune system, infertility, erectile dysfunction, constricted blood vessel and hypertension, COPD, cervical cancer and many others. Still human beings are seen to continue smoking habit due to low health literacy (Radnitz et al. 2015). Improper sexual health is also seen to be another lifestyle issue that makes many individuals develop short term or long-term disorders affecting their quality life. Having multiple sex workers, having unprotected coitus, blood transfusion from used needles all result in occurrence of AIDs in individuals that results in destruction of life. United Kingdom has huge prevalence of sexually transmitted disorders such as Chlamydia and many others. The NHS has been organising programs all over the nation to make people educated about the unhealthy sexual choices of people and the effect that it can have on their health. Health promotion campaigns are also seen to promote healthy ways of sexual activities and safer sex in every community. Alcohol consumption has effects like cancer, lung disorders, heart disorders, liver damage, pancreatitis, stomach distress, fatigue and many others. Moreover, work culture of today has become flexible and therefore, it has negative effects on the biological cycle of human beings affecting their physiological process like digestion and sleeping patterns. People have become more focused on their professional lives in comparison to healthcare (Cha et al. 2016). They tend to skip meals, work for longer hours than body permits and many others. Work related issues like backaches, visual deficits due to excessive working on laptops, computers and phones and similar others things have also affected the quality of life of people in present generation.
Palliative Care
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