Working life (public health knowledge)

Public health knowledge

As a public health knowledge professional, a large part of your work would focus on resources of information about people’s health and wellbeing needs. These resources are usually libraries, and you would be responsible for maintaining and managing them. You would also research and collect information from a wide variety of sources, making sure that it is accurate and suitable for the purpose for which it is to be used.

Caroline de Brún, a knowledge and evidence manager, talks to Health Careers about her work in public health.

Download transcript [3]

Other likely aspects of such a role could be:

• responding to requests from colleagues to find information about public health
• delivering documents as requested by colleagues
• helping colleagues to understand information about public health
• managing collections of printed and digital documents
• staying up to date with current developments in information in your field
• training others in information skills and knowledge management

Where will I work?

As a public health knowledge professional, you could work in a range of locations and organisations in the UK:

• England

  At a national level you could be working for example, at the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities [4], NHS England [5] or the Government Statistical Service [6].

  At a local level, you could be working within a local authority within a public health team or a council’s intelligence team. You might also work within NHS commissioning support units [7], which means that you might be providing expertise to a clinical commissioning group [8] about services they provide to a local area.

• Scotland

  In Scotland, the main employers of public health knowledge and intelligence professionals are:

  • Scottish Public Health Observatory [9]
  • NHS National Services Scotland [10] 
  • local NHS Health Boards [11]

• Wales

  In Wales the main employer of public health knowledge and intelligence professionals is the Public Health Wales Observatory [12].

• Northern Ireland

  In Northern Ireland, the main emplyer of public health knowledge and intelligence staff is Ireland and Northern Ireland’s Population Health Observatory [13].

Partner logos

[14]