Public health is all around us. The list could go on and on. Public health is all around us and almost everyone would say that public health activities are important and worthwhile. Often people confuse public health with healthcare for the poor. While some health departments do provide primary health care, public health is mostly about those activities and programs that deal with a community or population rather than a particular individual.
Public health is most often about preventing or reducing the seriousness of illness and injury.
The outcomes benefit individuals but the focus is on communities and populations. This document defined public health and put public health activities into three broad functional categories, which are now commonly called core functions. Based on the IOM's 1988 work and the experiences of public health practitioners of using core functions to redefine public health, the Center's for Disease Control created a workgroup called the Public Health Functions Steering Committee. This group developed and proposed Ten Essential Public Health Services. The short introduction section to this outstanding report discusses the core function definitions and the ten essential services as well as other efforts to better define what public health is all about.