Integrating clinical and public health knowledge in support of joint medical practice
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COMMENTARY
Open Access
Integrating clinical and public health knowledge in support of joint medical practice Jean-Pierre Unger1*, Ingrid Morales2, Pierre De Paepe1 and Michel Roland3
Abstract Background: Strong relations between medicine and public health have long been advocated. Today, professional medical practice assumes joint clinical/public health objectives:
GPs are expected to practice community medicine; Hospital specialists can be involved in disease control and health service organisation; Doctors can teach, coach, evaluate, and coordinate care; Clinicians should interpret protocols with reference to clinical epidemiology. Public health physicians should tailor preventive medicine to individual health risks.
This paper is targeted at those practitioners and academics responsible for their teams’ professionalism and the accessibility of care, where the authors argue in favour of the epistemological integration of clinical medicine and public health. Main text: Based on empirical evidence the authors revisit the epistemological border of clinical and public health knowledge to support joint practice. From action-research and cognitive psychology, we derive clinical/public health knowledge categories that require different transmission and discovery techniques. The knowledge needed to support the universal human right to access professional care bridges both clinical and public health concepts, and summons professional ethics to validate medical decisions. To provide a rational framework for teaching and research, we propose the following categories: ‘Know-how/practice techniques’, corresponding a.o. to behavioural, communication, and manual skills; ‘Procedural knowledge’ to choose and apply procedures that meet explicit quality criteria; ‘Practical knowledge’ to design new procedures and inform the design of established procedures in new
contexts; and Theoretical knowledge teaches the reasoning and theory of knowledge and the laws of existence and
functioning of reality to validate clinical and public health procedures. (Continued on next page)
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Public Health, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nationalestraat 155, B-2000 Antwerp, Belgium Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will ne
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