Are Public Health Professions and Healthcare Careers the Same?
Last year, I wrote a very personal blog about my journey to find the path of public health. I often advise undergraduate and graduate students as they try to navigate degree paths to help others. During advising appointments, my goal is to set students up on an educational track that will use their passions and gifts as they serve the world around them. Some students have a heart for one-on-one care for the sick and others prefer population health and disease prevention. Recently, the Association of Schools & Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) shared an insightful post highlighting the distinction between public health and healthcare careers within different categories. I thought it would be helpful to share on my blog as another resource for students trying to determine their degree paths. It is also informative for anyone interested in learning how to define public health and healthcare professions. The list below is from ASPPH and helps distinguish between jobs in public health and healthcare.
A 99.9% Survival Rate?! How to Understand Disease Calculations and Interpretations
If I think back to when the pandemic first started, I remember being surprised when I started hearing so many people use epidemiologic terminology such as mortality rate, survival rate, and more. In my home, we talk about public health ALL THE TIME. Dinner table discussions about the burden of disease, access to care, and brainstorming innovative public health solutions are common. In fact, just for fun, my oldest son and I would draw epi maps of disease distribution and calculate R0 as we learned more and more about COVID-19.
As the pandemic continued, I quickly realized that even though public health terminology was being thrown around, we were not speaking the same language as I heard so many calculations and analyses misinterpreted. Mortality rate was the calculation I heard misrepresented most often. Did you ever hear someone say that COVID has a 0.1041% death rate? Or did you ever hear the opposite of that, which was presented as COVID has a 99.8959% survival rate? I heard those so often! I remember the first time I heard a news channel interview physicians who were stating that COVID has a 99.89% survival rate, and I was in utter shock! As news with incorrect biostatistical calculations began to spread, the questions started rolling in from family, friends, students, and colleagues…