Careers in Public Health Health Article

CAREERS IN PUBLIC HEALTH

As a field of employment, public health offers a wide range of opportunities, requiring all levels of skills, and both technological and interpersonal expertise. Public health practice is distinguished within the general field of health practice by the regular interprofessional collaborations required for success. There are few (if any) tasks that need to be done in public health that are done by only one profession, and there are many challenges that benefit from the thinking of people trained with different world views. Public health is practiced in settings that range from the most sophisticated of laboratories in large urban centers to plain meeting rooms in small hamlets. As an additional challenge, any one public health worker may move from office to field investigation to legislative hearing in the course of a week's work. Individuals originally employed for a specific technical skill, such as the ability to perform a new laboratory test or explain a new vaccine, may, over the course of five or ten years, move into a completely different part of public health, drawn by shifts in community need, opportunity for advancement, or desire to continue learning.

Public health encompasses many familiar professions: medicine, nursing, social work, dentistry, pharmacy. But there are some roles that are less familiar: health educator, sanitarian, environmental engineer, disease investigator. Some people in these fields have chosen public health practice as a career at the outset, and obtained training in public health or a public health–related area as a part of their professional education. For others, public health represents a midcareer shift, perhaps associated with a desire to focus not on the treatment of disease but on its prevention. Many public health careers are at the technical level: laboratory technicians, radiation safety technicians; technical support staff in vital records and health statistics, or in communicable disease clinics and community outreach programs.