Community Medicine is the field concerned with the study of health and disease in a defined community or group. The subject deals with population, and comprises those doctors who try to measure the needs of the populations, both sick and well, who plan and administer services to meet those needs and those who are engaged in research and teaching in the field.
Community Medicine medical care is directed towards service to the entire population of the community, with emphasis on preventive medicine. With advances in scientific knowledge and better understanding of the causes of diseases, knowledge about germs, relationship between nutrition and illness and progress in the science of epidemiology etc, new dimensions in medicine have been opened. Subjects like social medicine and Community Medicine have been introduced to describe certain aspects of science to focus the community at the centre of interventions, rather than health of individuals. Certain types of problems can be better addressed through the community than the individual. For instance, a nation-wide nutritional education campaign with respect to food habits that would reduce vitamin A deficiency and prevent night blindness would eventually benefit individuals, but the community approach would yield faster results in the long run, with less cost.
Community Medicine addresses issues such as cheaper methods of treatment, less costly inputs to achieve health, cheap and effective methods to train and use community workers in health care, efficient deployment of resources by identifying high-risk targets, community motivation, health awareness creation etc.