MCCQE1 Public Health All Possible Questions and Answers with complete solution

Public health definition - Answer-organized efforts of society to keep people healthy and prevent injury, illness and premature death. It is a combination of programs, services and policies that protect and promote the health of all Canadians A typical list of public health responsibilities includes - Answer-A typical list of public health responsibilities includes Surveillance Health promotion Health protection Disease and Injury Prevention Screening Population Health Assessment Emergency preparedness Vulnerable Populations Definition of sureillance - Answer-collecting, interpreting and communicating health data and acting upon it in order to identify disease trends, emerging pathogens, etc Definition of health promotion - Answer-encouraging healthy behaviors (e.g., smoking legislation), building healthy environments (bicycle paths, etc). Definition of health protection - Answer-more specific than health promotion, this targets particular health hazards and reduces people's exposure to them. Drug safety regulations; food inspections; hazardous substances and pollution; vector control and smoke-free spaces are examples Population Health Assessment: - Answer-monitoring underlying social trends that affect health (poverty, homelessness, drug use, etc.) and encouraging government s to address these. This relates to health promotion, but moves the focus of attention upstream, to address underlying determinants.Disease and Injury prevention: - Answer-Closely related to health protection, this focuses on particular diseases/conditions. Many approaches are best implemented at the population level: food safety; immunization; outbreak control; road safety; playground design, etc. Emergency Preparedness: - Answer-Natural disasters, infectious disease, bioterrorism, etc. An aspect of health protection, but more generic as we do not know precisely what we must protect against Vulnerable Groups: - Answer-protecting the health of particular groups such as maternal and infant health, refugees, etc. Differece between passive and active surveillance - Answer-Surveillance may be passive, in which the system waits for cases to be reported, or active, in which you search out the cases of disease. Active surveillance may be necessary with an outbreak of a new disease (such as SARS), in which physicians in the community would not routinely be reporting cases. Active surveillance might (for example) involve calling hospital staff who took sick leave from work to see whether they had symptoms compatible with SARS. Reportable conditions - Answer-COmmunicable disease, driving, any conditon calusing LOC, alcohol or drug addiction, seizures/ vonculsions, corrected vision less than 20/50 imapired judgement ( dementia) Examples of primary prevention - Answer-Primary prevention may be aimed at individuals or at whole communities. Individual approaches (encouraging your patient to stop smoking) have the advantages that the clinician's personal contact should be motivational; the message can be tailored to the patient, and you can support him in actually making the decision to stop. But the limitation is that your advice does not tackle underlying forces driving his behaviour in the first place or the context in which his behaviour occurs (his friends may continue to smoke). Therefore, a community or population approach (e.g. via mass media advertising, increasing taxes, or banning smoking in public places) tries to change risk factors in the whole population. It is more radical and may produce cultural and contextual changes that support individual efforts