Stories are Central to the Collective Human Identity and so is Health

Abstract

The failure of public health to achieve its objective is ingrained partly in its inability to adapt to change and partly to its preference for evidence-only models. The arrival and elevated emphasis on statistics and calculus as defining the success of systems and the extension of the same to public health has only worked toward strengthening its overreliance on evidence-only implementation strategies and models. However, public health, unlike medicine and more like social sciences gains from its application to the broader public good and takes its lessons more from the success stories among the public than from the calculation based on a few datasets. There is no public health without public and since stories are central to the construction of the public, there underutilization in the delivery of public health needs a relook.

Keywords

• health
• public
• stories