I have been in this role for five years and have responsibility for health protection across Milton Keynes, the Borough of Bedford and Central Bedfordshire.
There are two parts to my role, planned work and unplanned work, each taking up about half of my time.
The planned work involves a variety of activities.
For instance, I work on our local health protection campaigns to keep our local professionals and population well informed about infectious diseases and infection prevention and control. I also oversee the local implementation of the national screening and immunisation programmes, and the implementation of community infection prevention and control programmes.
Other work involves the development of documents. For example, I help to develop our public health policies and procedures, working with colleagues from many different departments in the local authority (including the Mayor and elected members who bring a political dimension to the agenda) and with organisations such as NHS England, the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), Acute Trust and community providers. I also develop and write reports for the Health and Wellbeing Board. In addition, I am responsible for researching and writing the health protection chapter in the annual assessment of the local population’s health needs, and have deadlines to meet for most of my planned work.
My previous experience and understanding of clinicians is particularly helpful when working in on the redesign of health services and the evaluation of the health services (what we call “healthcare public health”). My clinical knowledge is also important in the health improvement aspect of my role, for example in the areas of cardiovascular disease and stroke prevention, cancer prevention, and vaccine-preventable diseases.
The second part of my role is reactive work. I support the management of outbreaks of infectious communicable diseases, such as respiratory disease, food poisoning, or any other infectious disease incident or outbreak. Every week there’s something different and of course the unpredictability and incident management is both exciting and interesting!
I am a member of our Local Resilience Forum which brings together the emergency services, local authorities, National Health Service, Public Health England and public sector agencies in emergency planning and responding to any major incidents.
As a trained member of a Scientific and Technical Advisory Cell (STAC), I provide specialist public health advice on any major incident affecting the health of our local population.
