Abstract
There is no common consensus on the meaning of public health and its future goals and there are different understandings among states about objectives and how public health services are organized. The new public health can be generally defined as an integrative approach to protect and promote the health status of the individuals and population. New public health focuses especially on disease prevention, health promotion, education and cross-sectoral action, including decisions and activities beyond the health system, well-being and health of society, communities, and individuals.
The policy of new public health is based on responsibility of national, regional, and local governments, with significant international engagement (e.g., World Health Organization—WHO, European Commission—EC) for the well-being and health of society and self-care by the community and the individual. From European perspective, the new public health policy no longer concentrates on a series of separate or specific condition-oriented programs as it had over the past several years. Currently, the focus has been switched to health status, health determinants and health systems. This is also reflected by the key European health documents such as the EC health strategy
Several of Essential public health operations include risk assessment, policy analysis, and impact assessment. The chapter describes main issues how to link risk assessment to policies and public health functions.
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Guliš, G. et al. (2014). Public Health, Policy Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Impact Assessment. In: Guliš, G., Mekel, O., Ádám, B., Cori, L. (eds) Assessment of Population Health Risks of Policies. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8597-1_1
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