Healthcare and Public Health Sector. Social Sciences Essay

Healthcare and Public Health Sector
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The Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21) affirms the federal government’s commitment to strengthening the security and resilience of the nation’s essential infrastructure against possible threats. Most importantly, PPD-21 requires that all federal departments and agency heads are responsible for identifying, prioritizing, assessing, and promoting critical infrastructures that support all essential functions. The healthcare and public health sectors are among the twenty-one critical sectors, focusing on safeguarding essential sectors against disease outbreaks. In healthcare, essential assets are mainly owned by private organizations, and this necessitates the need for collaboration and information sharing among private and public sectors.
The healthcare and public health sectors operate across all states, territories, and tribal areas and respond to recovery processes for both human-made and natural calamities. Besides, although healthcare is locally managed, public health components are managed across all government levels (Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, 2020). Some of the numerous threats and hazards are being addressed; these include Coronavirus (COVID-19). The global pandemic has affected all states across the United States and has left thousands of Americans dead. Public and private players have been involved in determining effective strategies to manage and prevent the spread of the virus and provide treatment to individuals who have been infected.
Besides, both the public and private sectors are focused on managing the opioid pandemic. It is estimated that nearly 130 individuals died every day due to complications associated with an opioid-related overdose. The primary treatment for opioid addiction includes preventing access to illegal substances and easy access to reversal drugs. The healthcare players are involved in providing behavioral health and primary care to help individuals with opioid drug overdose (Human Resource & Service Administration, 2020). The United States Department of Health and Human Services is involved in leading programs aimed at managing health threats at all levels of government. The public and private healthcare players are focused on dealing with health problems associated with physical inactivity. Regular physical exercises are critical for preventing and managing numerous health conditions such as obesity, depression and anxiety, and cancer.
The consequences of compromising the healthcare and public health sector are disastrous and detrimental. At the community level, a compromised healthcare sector would easily result in broken families caused by high mortality rates where disease outbreaks would increase the number of deaths, thus separating people from their loved ones. For example, diseases such as COVID-19 may claim the lives of parents making the children orphans and thus dependent on the community. Besides, incompetent healthcare and public health sector would be unable to control health threats, which would facilitate the fast spreading of the infections, increasing the financial burdens among the communities.
As a result, such a failure would result in something of a chain re...