The most recent research I have conducted is my Master of Public Health in Global Health thesis. Below I share my work's title and introduction.
Development of a "Provision of Health Security Index" - Concept, Methodology, and Implications
Global public health security relies on preemptive and responsive measures that aim “to minimize the danger and impact of public health events that endanger people’s health across geographical regions and international boundaries,” describes the World Health Organization.[1] Among public health professionals, this places an emphasis on early health promotion behaviors and disease prevention, as to reduce or eliminate the later diagnosis and treatment of diseases.[2] Health services being physically available, economically accessible, and health-literately utilizable are therefore imperative to global public health security, as they comprise the foundation of health promotion while relating to a central principle defined by the World Health Organization’s Constitution: “forming an informed opinion and [thus the] active co-operation on the part of the public [which] are of the utmost importance in the improvement of the health of the people”.[3] Nonetheless, to the best of my knowledge, no measure exists which encompasses the dimensions of access, availability, and utilization of health services to study a specific population health outcome. However, as these dimensions together with stability form the foundation of food and nutrition security, I hypothesized that, similarly, the dimensions of access, availability, and utilization of health services are associated with population health outcomes. To determine whether this hypothesis may be rejected or not, I constructed a novel Provision of a Health Security (PHS) Index which provides a snapshot of the multidimensionality of availability, access, and utilization capabilities of public health services in countries around the world. I performed principal component analysis as well as an F-Test to examine the legitimacy of reducing the three components into one. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, I examined the associations between the PHS score and four child and maternal population health outcomes (specifically, mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births), prevalence of stunting, height for age (% of children under 5), prevalence of wasting, weight for height (% of children under 5), and maternal mortality ratio (modeled estimate, per 100,000 live births)), controlling for the Universal Health Coverage index, per capita income, polity, income inequality, percentage of rural population, and regional fixed-effects.