Child Public Health

Georgia Southern University faculty members Joseph Telfair and Helen W. Bland co-authored "Child Public Health" alongside Rakhi Trivedi, Valamar Reagon, and Jazzmin Williams in Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies.

Introduction: Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (World Health Organization 1948, cited under Macro System Overview). Public health promotes and protects the health of children, families, and the communities where they live, learn, work, and play. As a discipline, its focus is at all three levels of prevention—primary, secondary, and tertiary. Overall, public health is concerned with protecting the health of entire populations. Public health professionals have a focus on preventing problems from happening or recurring through implementing educational programs, recommending policies to protect health and prevent disease, administering services, and conducting research. Child public health is a major area of focus in public health, and directing the resources and services to improve the health of children is crucial to having healthy populations as adults. There are many determining factors that affect child health, which can be studied through the integrated concepts of macro, meso, and micro systems of care. In planning the services and interventions under child public health, the systems of care (macro, meso, and micro) help to find the root cause by understanding social challenges, including family and community, environmental conditions, and legal rights. The decision was made to provide a framework for this review that gives the reader an overview of documents (articles, reports, book chapters) reflective of this holistic approach to the discussion of child public health.