In this article, we are going to get a quick overview of aspects of management science that are important in public health and are often overlooked and about the tools and models that over the years have been found particularly useful. One way of defining public health is that it is the intersection of epidemiology and management science. Now many of you will think that’s too narrow and we have left out health economics, demography, and human rights and advocacy etcetera. But firstly Epidemiology is all about understanding the distribution of disease and other states of health, geographically or over time and understanding the relationship between risk factors and interventions and disease in these various states of health. So epidemiology done well should take into account the social determinants of health like gender, equity, humanoids and take into account the drivers of health and disease like demography and economics. Basically, all of these other disciplines contribute to our understanding of the underlying epidemiological questions which are what is the burden of disease, what risk factors are contributing to that burden of disease, what population groups are at risk and what interventions are making a difference in terms of changing and mitigating that risk or that burden of disease. So Epidemiology answers the questions in the same manner that management science, by contrast, answers the questions on how do we get things done, how do we operationalize our plans, how do we mobilize our resources, how do we implement, how do we lead and how do we govern. There are aspects of management science which if done well will make you an extremely effective public health practitioner and these include managing people, managing processes and managing budgets. For example, let’s imagine that there’s a little village or a town somewhere in Africa, there are people with HIV but they’re not getting their drugs because the local clinic has run out of drugs. Epidemiologically we know exactly what’s going on here and understand that lack of access to medicines affects the outcome of disease and the burden of disease in the community. The solution to this problem however lies in management science in that we need to make sure that these people get their drugs and for that many processes work together like quantification and demand forecasting, procurement, financing, shipping, distribution, inventory management, etc. these are all things that have to be in place before those people can get their drugs and believe it or not getting all of those things in place really boils down to managing people, managing processes and managing budgets.
So here are a few ideas and resources and models that are useful for properly understanding and co-relating the concept of public health with management science.
- Gantt charts are an excellent way to visualize the various elements within a project and each element has its respective start and end time within a timeline and importantly one can include dependencies so one element can’t start until another element is finished. Gantt chart can be used firstly to plan projects but also to monitor the progress of projects as they unfold over time. They’re extremely easy to understand so everybody involved with the project knows exactly what’s going on and they’re easy to make in Microsoft Excel for example.
- Business Process Model and Notation – this is a way to visualize complex processes using standard icons that represent different kinds of elements within that process.
EXAMPLE OF A BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL AND NOTATION
Balanced Scorecards – this is a simple and easy to use performance management tool that uses a combination of financial and non-financial metrics
Value Chain Analysis – this is an important tool to help organizations understand and sometimes restructure how they can add value and meet their objectives. If you’re a senior manager or a leader in an organization then this is an absolute must.
These are some basic tools that help in establishing the correlation between public health and management science. As one transitions into leadership it becomes equally necessary to learn about organizational structure, stakeholder mapping, change management and risk management because these are some elements that you need to apply management science with the domain of public health to achieve proper organizational structure and vision.
