A multidimensional classification of public health activity in Australia

Abstract

Background: At present, we have very limited ability to compare public health activity across jurisdictions and countries, or even to ascertain differences in what is considered to be a public health activity. Existing standardised health classifications do not capture important dimensions of public health, which include its functions, the methods and interventions used to achieve these, the health issues and determinants of health that public health activities address, the resources and infrastructure they use, and the settings in which they occur. A classification that describes these dimensions will promote consistency in collecting and reporting information about public health programs, expenditure, workforce and performance. This paper describes the development of an initial version of such a classification.

Public Health Surveillance Systems: Recent Advances in Their Use and Evaluation

“…The establishment of common terminologies can facilitate comparative research and the sharing of software, including the sharing of surveillance software across public health agencies. An Australian group of researchers has taken a first step in this direction by developing a taxonomy of public health actions including surveillance (41), and other researchers have built upon this model and used it as the core of a chronic disease surveillance system (59). Similar work has developed shareable models to guide the conduct of reportable disease surveillance (25).…”

PopHR: a knowledge‐based platform to support integration, analysis, and visualization of population health data

“…The PHOnt is a domain ontology incorporating more general concepts and relations, which can be reused by other applications and ontologies. The PHOnt is based on the Australian Classification of Public Health Activity and covers the issues and methods relevant to the broad domain of public health. The PHOnt defines many associative relations among its classes; in particular, it encodes a large body of knowledge about causal pathways from upstream health determinants to diseases and their outcomes.…”

PHIRE (Public Health Innovation and Research in Europe): methods, structures and evaluation

“…Classifications of public health activities include EUPHID indicators 22 and health promotion functions in Australia. 23 In SPHERE, priorities for public health research were mapped from perspectives of ministries of health, national public health associations and 80 civil society health organizations. 24 GIS-IReSP 19 has important listings of public health research in French.…”