Question: Allocating Public Health Resources

Imagine that you are standing on the bank of a river and injured people start floating down the river towards you. There is no end to the floating people...they just keep coming and coming. You are alone and you do not have cell service to phone for back up. What do you do? In your discussion post, discuss what type of assistance you would want to provide. Explain where you think it would be best to focus your energy assisting (ie. should you stay where you are and pull people out of the river, or should you go upstream to find out why injured people are ending up in the river?) Determine what proportion of assistance should go to aiding injured people versus preventing the cause of the injuries in the first place. Justify your reasoning for why you would allocate your resources that way. (There is no right or wrong answer to this; it is a matter of determining the priorities between treatment vs. prevention.)