by Trevor Hancock, CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal blog), 7 October 2015
Trevor Hancock is a professor and senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s school of public health and social policy
I have worked in public health for most of my adult life, and am proud of my chosen profession. Not to be confused – as it often is – with publicly funded health care, public health is focused on keeping people healthy, protecting them from harm and preventing disease, injury and disability.
To be sure, we do not garner the headlines of the more flashy and usually over-hyped ‘medical miracles’; nobody ever wrote a headline about the 100 cases of an infection or cancer that did not happen. But the work we do is vitally important – at least as important as the latest ‘life-saving’ technology or drug.
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