Test Your Blood Pressure: A Public Health Measure: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Equity

Public health is a societal effort to ensure wellbeing within a population. Through promotion of health and prevention of disease efforts, Public Health offers good quality of life with education, regulation, and research.

For our public health blog, we visited a CVS Pharmacy where we were able to locate a public blood pressure machine near the pharmacy waiting area. This location makes it convenient for individuals to check their blood pressure while they wait to be served. Our group decided to place the “This is Public Health” sticker near the informational guide to weight and blood pressure maintenance, called the Health Station. We chose this location due in part to the value we all place on early prevention measures to defend against hypertension which can lead to larger problems such as heart disease. Since we knew that CVS had the public blood pressure machine, we decided that it was conducive to the purpose of our project. Upon arriving at our location, we each took advantage of the machine’s availability to the public and used it to determine our own individual blood pressures. Thankfully were all in the normal range. It is extremely convenient to have access to such a machine which can serve as early detection for any abnormalities; the health guide near the machine is also a significant component to understanding the maintenance of a healthy blood pressure.

This readily available blood pressure machine is crucial to the secondary prevention stage in Public Health. It also serves the purpose of educating the community through its accessibility to all individuals regardless of their socioeconomic status. The purpose of this machine fulfills the early detection and prevention mission of Public Health. If a prehypertensive blood pressure is detected, one could potentially reduce the risk of heart disease through careful monitoring (i.e. medication). This issue is important to avoid the all too common and unfortunate complications and medical bills of heart disease. Prevention is more economical than treatment.

~Ana, Chea-Ee, Narayesi, Rosangelis