Health Education

Bioterrorism, drug-resistant disease, transmission of disease by global travel...there's no shortage of challenges facing America's public health officials. Men and women preparing to enter the field require state-of-the-art training to meet these increasing threats to the public health. But are the programs they rely on prepared to provide the high caliber professional training they require? Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? provides an overview of the past, present, and future of public health education, assessing its readiness to provide the training and education needed to prepare men and women to face 21st century challenges. Advocating an ecological approach to public health, the Institute of Medicine examines the role of public health schools and degree-granting programs, medical schools, nursing schools, and government agencies, as well as other institutions that foster public health education and leadership. Specific recommendations address the content of public health education, qualifications for faculty, availability of supervised practice, opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and education, cooperation with government agencies, and government funding for education. Eight areas of critical importance to public health education in the 21st century are examined in depth: informatics, genomics, communication, multi-cultural health, community-based participatory research, global health, policy and law, and public health ethics. The book also includes a discussion of the policy implications of its ecological framework.

Health care policy and proposals for national health care reform have become some of the most contentious political issues of the decade. Garland Publishing announces a new series addressing the most significant issues in the area of health care policy and the business of health care in the United States. books in this multidisciplinary series will include studies of health care practice, the health care business, the implications of multicultural perspectives on health care for public policy, the impact of insurance on health care, and debates over national health care policy, including health care reform. This collection of timely works will offer significant scholarly perspectives on one of the most important issues in public policy. An unfulfilled promise This book examines why educational investments by African American women, the group in American society that is most susceptible to being poor, have not reduced poverty as expected. In the United States, public policies rely heavily on education as the powerful mechanism by which economic opportunity will be provided. However, although African American women followed the prescription set forth by human capital theory and increased their educational attainment from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the promised payoffs to additional schooling did not materialize. An important indirect effect The analysis in this study reveals that the ability of human capital investment to alleviate poverty for African American women differs depending on whether one estimates private or social returns. In the individual-level analysis, education is a strong negative determinant of poverty and is equally sensitive for each time periodstudied. Education is also a critical mediating variable between family of origin, teen birth, and poverty, suggesting its important indirect effect on women's later economic prosperity.