DPAS Canadian Public Health

Today, we had an interesting DPAS lecture on the Public Health (PH) domain of the Canadian goverment. I kinda had an idea of what PH meant initially, but it was insightful to have some guest speakers come in and talk about their work in this domain. In Canada and its provinces, the medical profession is self-regulated by the respective provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons. The College's roles include certifying doctors to practice, monitoring and maintaining a standard of practice and has the power to investigate and discipline its members for professional misconduct or incompetence. Basically, it's a body created to bolster the fidelity and trust held between those practising medicine and the public. All this done, with the foremost intention of protecting and serving public interest. However, doctors don't simply answer to this self-regulating body, but also to the government both provincially and nationally through Public Health. Each province is divided into multiple 'health regions' as public health in Canada is primarily provincial jurisdiction with all regions operating autonomously and slightly differently depending on regional needs and geography.

Public Health, as you can tell from the name deals with health in a holistic perspective. The contrasting analogy made in lecture was that a doctor is to their patient, what a public health officer is to a population of people. Instead of looking at one patient, diagnosing their problem and ending with treatment, a public health officer has to look at a health problem in the context of a population and be able to discern the impact that one health variable can have on many people at once (ie. the spread of a contagious and dangerous communicable disease). Instead of looking at the symptoms of one particular patient, public health officers have to do meta-analysis with data to see the problem in its gross entirety.

There were some interesting things mentioned throughout the lecture by the various guest speakers who all have appointments in Public Health roles. Dr. John Carsley mentioned how simply putting suicide barriers significantly dettered the number of individuals who died every year who were in seirous comtemplation of commiting suicide on a particular bridge. It's strange why most people who want to commit suicide gravitate towards a particular bridge in the city despite there being many to choose from. It is Public Health that should recognize this and take measures to deter suicides simply by identifying the suicide-popular bridges and installing barriers. Another intersting thing, Dr. Howard Njoo, mentioned the importance that physicians who come across and identify individuals with serious communicable diseases that pose a safety threat to the public are required by law to report it to Public Health. If a physician is caught not doing so, they could be fined up to $100,000 or take 12 months in prison. In Canada, provincially, people who test positive for HIV must be reported in confidentiality to the regional Public Health office either nominally/non-nominally (full name disclosed/initials of name disclosed) along with particular demographic information. Basically, there has to be a means of identifying the individual diagnosed with HIV so that Public Health has the means to locate and contact the individual who may pose a threat to the safety of the general public. Finally, it was a honour to have Dr. Howard Njoo, Director General (3 steps below Steven Harper) of the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response of the Public Health Agency of Canada fly over from Ontario to speak to us. One of his convictions was that he would like to see the arbitrary barriers that have existed for so long which prevents doctors in Canada from easily practising interprovincially. Currently, if you're a doctor practising say in BC, you would have to go through the strenous process of acquiring a license to practise in another province in the SAME country. In other countries around the world, a doctor can freely practise anywhere in the country. That makes sense. A lot of times, the status quo just doesn't make sense anymore since it's ideas are outdated. It's time to make some sense out of that which is insensible.