Evidence based public health ?the need of the hour

Increasing disease rates, lim-ited funding, and the ever-growing scientific basis for inter-vention demand the use of proven strategies to improve population health. An ever-expanding evi-dence base, detailing programs and policies that have been scien-tifically evaluated and proven to work, is available to public health practitioners. The practice of evi-dence-based public health (EBPH) is an integration of science-based interventions with community preferences for improving popu-lation health. Public health decision making is a complicated process because of complex inputs and group de-cision making. Public health evi-dence often derives from cross-sectional studies and quasi-experimental studies, rather than the so-called “gold standard” of randomized controlled trials often used in clinical medicine. Study designs in public health sometimes lack a comparison group, and the interpretation of study results may have to account for multiple caveats. Public health interventions are seldom a single intervention and often involve large-scale environmental or policy changes that address the needs and balance the preferences of large, often diverse, groups of people.