Youth's Reflection
Week 5
The training of week 7 of Youth Capacity Building 2017 was very inspirational and notable since the training derived under the framework of “Environment and Public Health”, which was focused on priority risks and future trends. This topic might be considered as the most important for further discussion because it is not compatible with only one country but also the universal as a whole. Of course, both environment and public health are correlated to each other that it might give us a comparison of causes and effects. I would draw myself into the connection how the environment will be the cause of public health problems, which known as the effects after I took part in the training. The topic gave me a bridge to define the terms; environment, health as well as public health, especially it has asserted me the core principles in regarding to social well-beings and some environmental problems that hinder humans from accessing to public health.
Well, the training probably could not become effective without assisting from Mr. Kong Sovann, who has experienced in both environment and health sector. He provided me and other trainees with specific concepts of environment that would lead to public health, and he alerted me to some emerging issues and its trends as categorized into THREE main issues: communicable diseases, noncommunicable diseases, and injuries. Nowadays, both communicable and noncommunicable diseases are the key challenges in the world which resulted in the increasing numbers of deaths, specifically the trends of noncommunicable diseases, while injuries caused fewer amounts of deaths. However, some countries have been successfully tackled the three main issues; for example, in European countries and some countries in Latin America, as probably people started to understand and be aware of how environment is necessary for them to get away from any diseases as well as they have a larger access to public health services. In a contradiction, some developing countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, the trends of communicable and noncommunicable diseases, and injuries still continue overwhelmingly compared to those developed countries because people are still lack of caring the environment including sanitation, hygiene, and they have limited access to public health services, so the improvements are needed to engage those people to acknowledge and understand their surrounding environments for the purpose of reducing or preventing from any diseases. So, it is evidenced that the training program lifted me to emerge of critical thinking as well as draw a comparative understanding between environment and public health.
Mr. Khan Rattana
CaMSafe Youth
Besides, I have learnt another important concept, which is social well-being. Actually, given definitions of environment, health, or public health are the pathways in allowing us to reach the concatenation of well-being defined. In a short definition, well-being might be defined as a state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy in which all humans require to fulfill these needs. So regarding this definition, we can assume that health is a core factor in driving to the concept of well-being that we must prefer to have as we cannot lack it. Actually, the training lectured by Mr. Kong Sovann provided me a platform to categorize the concepts of well-being including environmental, physical, financial, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual and so on, which are the key dimensions of resilience. However, among these dimensions, we noticed that environment is still a key element of compulsoriness to compromise of well-being. Of course, environment is a broad concept compared to other dimensions that we need to define and study it in depth because it links to how the environment will hinder us to meet a state of resilience, especially toward health accessing. Moreover, we also have discussed about key factors in Cambodia influenced by the environmental problems because Cambodian people are still lack of concern about the effects of those problems to their health. However, it is very necessary for us to bring with proposed solutions as well as the mitigation measure to tackle those environmental problems.
Although the time constrained, the training ended with knowledgeable contribution among the trainees and participants. I had obtained a lot from the lecture in regarding to a connection between environment and public health, which it has assisted me to be aware of prioritized risks and future trends of diseases thus solutions are required. In addition, the training enhanced my enthusiasm and boosted my understanding. I am waiting forward to gaining more knowledge from the training and any further discussion to be sorted out.
“A healthy environment is essential to livable humans of well-being”