Full Description
Deaths from preventable diseases have decreased life expectancy in the United States for the first time in a century, making it clear that we must deal with the crisis by embracing prevention as our nation's top health sector priority.
In Prevention First, Dr. Anand K. Parekh, chief medical advisor of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues that disease prevention must be our nation's top health policy priority. Building a personal culture of prevention, he writes, is not enough; elected officials and policymakers must play a greater role in reducing preventable deaths. This second edition includes important new developments in health policy, including US responses to and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the addition of learning objectives and key takeaways in each chapter to aid students and faculty.
Drawing on his experiences as a clinician, public servant, and policy advisor, Dr. Parekh provides examples of prevention in action from across the country, giving readers a view into why prevention-first policies are important and how they can be accomplished. Throughout the book, he demonstrates that, in order to optimize health in America, we must leverage health insurance programs to promote disease prevention, expand primary care, attend to the social determinants of health, support making the healthier choice the easy choice for individuals, and increase public health investments.
Providing concrete steps that federal policymakers should take to promote prevention both within and outside our healthcare sector, Prevention First not only sounds the alarm about the terrible consequences of preventable disease but serves as a rallying cry that we can and must do better in this country to reduce preventable deaths.
Contents
Foreward, by Tom Daschle and Bill Frist
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The State of Disease Prevention
Part I: Prevention Within the Healthcare System
1. How Do You Insert Prevention into Healthcare's Value Equation?
2. Why Is Strengthening Primary Care So Important for Prevention?
3. Where Should Healthcare Look Outside the Walls of the Clinical Setting?
4. Social Determinants and Healthcare: Is It Time to Go Upstream?
Part II: Prevention Outside the Healthcare Setting
5. Personal Responsibility or Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change?
6. Why Do We Take Public Health for Granted?
7. Public Health Emergency Preparedness: The Great Uniter?
8. Is Global Health US Health?
9. Twenty-First-Century Urgent Challenges and Promising Opportunities
Epilogue
Notes
Index
