Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance

Margaret Somerville is Director of Public Health and Health Policy, NHS Highland, Inverness K. Kumaran is a Consultant in Public Health Medicine, NHS Somerset Rob Anderson, Institute of Health Service Research, Peninsula Medical School, Exeter

Preface 6 Acknowledgements 7 About the authors 7 1 Introduction to public health 8 Epidemiology and Evidence-Based Practice 2 Incidence and prevalence 10 3 Risks and odds 12 4 Hierarchy of evidence and investigating causation 14 5 Bias, confounding and chance in epidemiological studies 16 6 Standardisation 18 7 Ecological and cross-sectional studies 20 8 Case-control and cohort studies 22 9 Trials (experimental studies) 24 10 Systematic reviews and meta-analysis 26 11 Diagnostic tests 28 Assessing Population Health 12 Health and illness 30 13 Demography 32 14 Epidemiological transition 34 15 Health information 36 16 Measuring population health status 38 17 Lifestyle determinants of health 40 18 Environmental determinants of health 42 19 Inequalities in health 44 20 Socio-economic inequalities in health 46 21 Health needs assessment 48 Improving and Protecting Health 22 Disease prevention 50 23 Principles of disease transmission 52 24 Communicable disease control 54 25 Surveillance 56 26 Immunisation 58 27 Screening principles 60 28 Screening programmes 62 29 Health promotion 64 30 Changing behaviour 66 Health Economics 31 Economic perspectives on health 68 32 Economic evaluation 70 33 Economic perspectives on measuring health-related outcomes 72 34 Economics of public health problems 74 Effective Health Care 35 Health care systems 76 36 Planning health services 78 37 Health care evaluation 80 Self-Assessment Self-assessment questions 82 Self-assessment answers 84 Appendix: Practical issues in conducting epidemiological studies 85 Further reading 87 Index 88