There's a whole bunch of us working in public health. There are the public health specialists whose primary role is to maintain and improve the public's health. These include public health consultants, health protection teams and public health managers. Then there are the public health practitioners, whose role involves furthering health by working with communities and groups. These include public health nurses, health visitors, midwives, community development workers, health promotion managers and environmental health officers. Finally, we have the academics, who come from a wide range of disciplines (medicine, epidemiology, statistics, sociology, economics, anthrology, geography, pyschology etc).This interdisciplinary field furthers the knowledge base, provides evidence for policies and interventions and teaches public health skills. We all have different roles to play but we work together in improving health of populations and protecting people from infectious diseases, chemical and environmental hazards and bioterrorism. It is because of public health pratitioners, you can eat out in a restaurant without getting sick, visit far flung places safely, have clean running water and good sanitation and live beyond childhood because of vaccination programmes that have removed threats of deadly diseases.

Public health work can be divided into three areas. The first deals with health promotion and reducing inequalities in health. You will be aware of some of the major public health issues of recent years, like the ban of smoking in public places, the campaign to reduce binge drinking and the growing concern about obesity. Health inequalities is a term we use to refer to the fact that despite universal access to health services in the UK, good health is not equally enjoyed by all. Diseases and deaths from ill health differ between geographical areas, social classes and ethnic groups. Essentially, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to suffer from an illness or have a lower life expectancy than richer folk. Click on HEALTH CAPITAL for the current hot topics in public health.

The second area is preoccupied with improving the quality of health services for the general public. Public health folk like procedures to be evidence based and the provision of services to be regularly evaluated. We are also insistant that health services match the needs of the users. By evidence based, we mean that the proposed service, intervention or treatment is not based on opinion but on research. And not just any old research, research that has been conducted properly. For more understanding of the methods used in evidence based research, click TOOLKIT.

The third area is health protection. This site is home to ON FLARE, the popular dramatisation of the exciting work Health Protection teams get up to in the UK. Catch up with the fictitious Castel Health Protection Unit each month as they battle outbreaks of communicable diseases and tackle chemical incidents.

To become a Consultant in Public Health/Public Health Medicine or a Consultant in Health Protection/Communicable Disease Control, one undergoes a five year training programme run by the Faculty of Public Health. Trainees are known as Specialty Registrars, which is the new name for Specialist Trainees in Public Health (non medics) and Specialist Registrars in Public Health (medics). If you are interested in training in public health, you can check out HOT DESK. This also contains information for current specialty registrars, such as tips for passing the dreaded MFPH exams!

Before I joined the public health training programme, I worked in academia as a medical sociologist. My specialism was sexual health, particularly looking at the social mechanisms that enable sexually transmitted infections to be spread. There is an abundance of incorrect information circulating in the media and in the public domain. In my column SERIOUSLY SEX, I take a sociological approach to sex and sexuality. Often we focus on the individual and on the psychology of sex and totally forget that sexual relations are social relations. They happen between two or more people (okay, sometimes one) and our sexual attitudes and behaviours are influenced by the society we live in or the culture we follow. I hope to able to communicate about the sociology of sex that is informative, interesting and (dare I say it) evidence based.

This website is continually under development, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions about public health, please drop me a line at dr_cath@hotmail.com.

I would like to extend my thanks to Dr Moneim Elhassan, who kindly contributed cartoons to this website.