Public Health Challenges Facing The United Kingdom, Singapore, and Taiwan

It’s A Small World After All
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It’s A Small World After All
The United Kingdom (UK)
The UK is a developed country with vast global cultural, scientific, economic, and political influence on other nations. Currently, smoking constitutes one of the health challenges in the country. Specifically, smoking is the country’s leading mortality cause and exacerbates life expectancy inequalities. Smoking potentiates several adverse health outcomes because it causes cancer as well as cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses. Obesity is yet another health issue in the country. Obesity is associated with the rising prevalence of other medical conditions such as breathing difficulties, joint pain, tiredness, and being overweight, which puts more pressure on the increasingly underfunded healthcare system. For example, there were 876000 obesity-related cases of hospital admissions recorded in 2018/19 in the UK (Everest et al., 2022). Due to the impacts posed by obesity, the government of the UK has allocated financial resources to purchase medical facilities to treat and control the spread of the disease. Furthermore, alcohol consumption has also become a critical healthcare challenge in the UK. Excessive alcohol consumption can negatively impact an individual’s health by triggering infections, cancer, and mental health problems.
Public Health England (PHE) is a public policy health agenda in the UK. The PHE agenda outlines how the government will safeguard, improve, and decrease health inequalities in the country within the next five years. PHE also addresses policies the government is undertaking to address smoking, obesity, and alcohol consumption as health issues facing the UK. For instance, PHE health policy outlines the measures adopted by the government to reduce the smoking prevalence among senior people in the UK from 15.5% to 12% by the end of 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a public health issue facing the UK. The pandemic has exacerbated healthcare disparities and led to high mortality rates (Department of Health and Social Care & Office for National Statistics, 2022). As a result, the UK government should allocate more financial resources to purchase medical equipment and other countermeasures to help combat the virus’s spread.
The UK has high-quality health care, as demonstrated by high satisfaction levels of citizens seeking health care services. According to Papanicolas et al. (2019), the UK spends more of its budget on providing quality healthcare services to the citizens, irrespective of diversity. This included providing high-quality healthcare services, such as treating chronic illnesses geared at enhancing care quality and safety and mitigating structural inequalities that undermine healthcare access amid the pandemic.
Singapore
Singapore is a developing nation in Southeast Asia. The country’s rapid growth is attributed to effective government policy that creates a better business environment and market economy. Singapore’s healthcare sector faces numerous challenges that undermine its affordability and quality. The shortage of an adequate workforce in h...