Part 1

Importance of Census Data

With regards to census data as applicable to your country:

1. Briefly explain why census data are critical to public health in your country. Be sure to provide examples of specific public health issues, needs or policies, which might rely on the census data.
2. You have been appointed as the Head of Public Health Services for the whole of your country. What changes would you introduce for the next census in order to improve:
   1. The comprehensiveness of the data (e.g. collecting more variables and data collection from targeted populations (e.g. indigenous, minorities, immigrants, ageing population, etc.);
   2. the quality of the data; and
   3. the health-related information that will help you to plan and monitor public health?

Please provide justification for these changes.

For nations to improve the health of their populations, some have cogently argued, they need to move beyond clinical interventions with high-risk groups. This concept was best articulated by Rose (1992), who noted that “medical thinking has been largely concerned with the needs of sick individuals.” Although this reflects an important mission for medicine and health care, it is a limited one that does little to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place, and it typically has disregarded issues related to disparities in access to and quality of preventive and treatment services. Personal health care is only one, and perhaps the least powerful, of several types of determinants of health, among which are also included genetic, behavioral, social, and environmental factors (IOM, 2000; McGinnis et al., 2002). To modify these, the nation and the intersectoral public health system must identify and exploit the full potential of new options and strategies for health policy and action.