Out of Our Comfort Zone to Improve Population Health: A Public Health of Consequence December 2017

摘要

Sir Geoffrey Rose made seminal contributions to our collective population health thinking over the past half century. He articulated—perhaps more clearly than anyone before him—the importance of thinking about the distributions of health between populations. His work leads us to appreciate that a comprehensive approach to population health almost inevitably necessitates an engagement with the social, cultural, and economic forces that shift the distributions of population health. The implications of this thinking are clear. If we see public health simply as the cumulative sum of individual behaviors and actions, our lens can safely restrict itself to working with individuals on eating better, exercising more, and ensuring proper hygiene. But if we now understand that our behaviors are also dictated and constrained by our circumstances, we have little choice but to consider these circumstances within our scope of research and action.