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The goals of healthcare and health policy, and the health-related dilemmas facing policy makers, professionals, and citizens are analysed and debated in a range of disciplines, including public health, sociology, and applied philosophy. The book's core argument is that clinical ethics needs to be understood in the context of public health ethics. This entails healthcare ethics embracing ‘the social dimension’ of health in two overlapping senses: first, the various respects in which health experiences and outcomes are socially determined; and second, the ways in which health-related goods are better understood as social rather then purely individual goods. This broader approach to the ethics of healthcare includes a concern with the social construction of both healthcare goods and the roles, ideals, and obligations of agents; that is to say it focuses upon the ‘value field’ of health-related action and not only upon the ethics of action within this value field. This book thus ‘opens up’ the agenda of healthcare ethics both methodologically and substantively: it argues that population-oriented perspectives are central to all healthcare ethics, and that everybody has some share of responsibility for securing health-related goods including the good of greater health equality. One of its major conclusions is that the rather limited tradition of health education policy and practice needs a complete re-think.

Despite children making up around a quarter of the population, the first edition of this book was the first to focus on a public health approach to the health and sickness of children and young people. It combined clinical and academic perspectives to explore the current state of health of our children, the historical roots of the speciality, and the relationship between early infant and child health on later adult health. Child public health is a rapidly developing field, and is increasingly recognised throughout the world as a major area of focus for population health. Targeting the health of children now is essential if we are to achieve a healthy population as adults. For the second edition the text has been revised and updated with new material on health for all children, global warming, child participation, systems theory, refugees, commissioning, and sustainable development.

Health systems everywhere are experiencing rapid change in response to new threats to health, including from lifestyle diseases, risks of pandemic flu, and the global effects of climate change, but health inequalities continue to widen. Such developments have profound implications for the future direction of public health policy and practice. This book offers a wide-ranging, provocative assessment of challenges confronting a public health system, exploring how its parameters have shifted and what the origins of dilemmas in public health practice are.

Rarely have humans been as threatened by viruses as they are today. It almost seems as if a virus invasion is taking place. Viruses have lately been coming out of nowhere and appearing in the strangest places — exotic viruses about which no one had ever heard before. Many human viruses have started out in the animal world. Are these viruses maybe escaping from their natural hosts? Are human beings simply available as easy prey? Why is all this happening now, and what does it mean for our future? What can we do to defend ourselves? This book addresses viral adaptation as a general phenomenon and examines the implications for public health of human behavior altering viral ecosystems. This book discusses the phenomenon of viral emergence.

We are told that ‘work is good for us’ and that ill-health is caused by ‘individual lifestyles’. Drawing on research from public health, social policy, epidemiology, geography, and political science, this evidence-based inter-disciplinary book firmly challenges these contemporary orthodoxies. It systematically demonstrates that work — or lack of it — is central to our health and wellbeing and is the underlying determinant of health inequalities. Work is the cornerstone of modern society and dominates adult life with around a third of our time spent working. It is a vital part of self-identity and for most of us, it is the foundation of economic and social status. As such, the material and psychosocial conditions in which we work have immense consequences for our physical and mental wellbeing, as well as the distribution of health across the population. Recessions, job-loss, insecurity, and unemployment also have important ramifications for the health and wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities. Chronic illness is itself a significant cause of worklessness and low pay. Drawing on examples from different countries, this book shows that the relationship between work, worklessness, and health varies by country. Countries with a more regulated work environment and a more interventionist and supportive welfare system have better health and smaller work-related health inequalities. The book provides examples of specific policies and interventions that mitigate the ill-health effects of work and worklessness. It concludes by asserting the importance of politics and policy choices in the aetiology of health and health inequalities.

This book aims to show the value of developing and applying an evidence base to public health. The application of evidence to clinical practice is well established, and the field of evidence-based medicine accepted as a basic clinical science, not so for public health. The book examines the methods used for Evidence Based Medicine, and shows how these can be applied to public health. In the process, a number of new measures are necessary to extend clinical measures to the population. Population impact measures are described and their value in public health policy-making described and discussed. The book identifies evidence for population health as an appropriate field of study. The chapters are divided in three sections to follow the structure of the Population Health Evidence Cycle: Ask the question, Collect the evidence, and Understand and use the evidence.

This book deals with changes in outlook of public health after the Second World War. Focussing on services, vaccination, and dealing with health issues at the local level, it can be seen that public health developed a new discourse post war. Centring on chronic disease, it became concerned with the concept of ‘risk’ and targeted individual behaviour. The mass media and centralized campaigning directed at the whole population replaced local campaigns. Politicians' early worries about the ‘nanny state’ gave way to a desire to inculcate new norms of behaviour. How change was to be achieved became a matter of much debate. Identifying debates between those believing in ‘systematic gradualism’ and those who advocated a more coercive approach, this book uses smoking as a model. Such debates brought into play tensions over the relationships between public health and industrial interests. Health campaigning by new style pressure groups like ASH, which were part state funded, was an important motive force behind the change. In the 1980s and 1990s, public health changed again. Passive smoking and HIV/AIDS brought environmental concerns back into public health, which had disappeared after the 1950s. The ‘rise of addiction’ for smoking demonstrated the power of pharmaceutical interests to define a new ‘pharmaceutical public health’, in which treatment and ‘magic bullets’ were also tactics for prevention. In the early 21st century, public health was to play to complex tensions and conflicting impetuses. This book shows that those tensions were nothing new and outlines their development over the last half century.