1.4: Population and Community Health
When a person goes to their doctor’s office, the physician’s primary goal is to diagnose and treat the individual. By contrast, public health focuses on population health or community health. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2014). While population and community are often used interchangeably in public health, they can also mean different things. A population is often used to describe a group that is larger and more defined by shared characteristics, such as age, sex, occupation, or geographic location. For example, a public health worker might be concerned about trends in poor maternal and infant health outcomes - thus the population they are focusing on is those who are pregnant or who have recently given birth and infants under age 1. Population health is concerned about identifying the distribution of diseases and the risk factors associated with them across and between different populations. A community is more often describing a geographically smaller group, like a town or neighborhood. Someone working in community health might focus their efforts on providing HIV tests to unhoused people in a specific area. Community health is seen as more of a “grass-roots” effort that takes into account the community culture and perceptions ( Community and Population Health , n.d.). Both population and community health are important for public health efforts at the county, state, national and global levels. Public health also tends to focus more heavily on prevention of poor health outcomes rather than treatment of diseases or illnesses that already exist (like the medical model does) (Schneider, 2020, p. 5).