Public Health Values
Health is among the most important conditions of life and is needed to achieve well being and happiness. Public Health is devoted to the pursuit of health with an emphasis on the prevention of disease and injury, and is a central basis for organizing health systems. Public Health recognizes individuals as the basic focus of its efforts, but seeks to improve the life of each person through systematic community and population based solutions.
Ethical values are guides for behavior and appropriate action. We therefore espouse these values as essential for the public health profession:
The pursuit of truth. Objective truth is sought through a scientific approach, which in public health entails the use of epidemiological and biostatistical methods and knowledge gained through the biological, behavioral and physical sciences.
Encouraging learning. We view life long learning for all people as fundamental for the optimization of health.
Benefit to each human being is a fundamental principle of public health action. Producing this benefit requires knowledge and skills, preeminent among which are the ability to communicate and to understand behavior and norms.
Personal responsibility. Individuals should try and societies should encourage individuals to assume responsibility for their own lives. Encouraging personal responsibility doesn't justify blaming victims for events beyond their control. Rather, it entails empowering people to take charge of decisions which affect their life and health status. As individuals make choices about the way they live, they should recognize the relationship between their actions and their own health.
Compassion and community responsibility. All persons have times of illness and weakness and need the assistance of family, friends, and community. Each person should endeavor to help others achieve optimum health status through individual effort or community action programs. These personal and institutional responsibilities are especially compelling in two areas: protecting the population as a whole in the spheres of their lives over which they have little or no personal control; and protecting vulnerable populations, particularly children, since they have both a limited ability to help themselves and represent society's collective investment in the future. Community action should be exercised with respect for human dignity and minimum trespass on liberty and privacy.
Cooperation because it is essential to the achievement of global stewardship and other public health values. It should be based on information, discussion, and collective consent and entails, among other things, an international perspective and commitment, and planning in areas of policy such as population, energy, food, air, water and space.
Professionalism. Public health practitioners and students constitute a community to help each other act rightly by commitment to standards such as personal integrity, collegiality and excellence in teaching, scholarship, community service and practice.
Equality and justice because they promote health for all within a diverse society.
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