About Public Health and Public Health Consultants

Public health is about improving and protecting the health of groups of people, rather than about treating individual patients.

Public health consultants must look at ‘the bigger picture’ and then take action to promote healthy lifestyles, prevent disease, protect and improve general health, and improve healthcare services.

The ‘population’ they are working for could be a rural community, an entire city, or the global population, but the principles remain the same.

Leading a cross-section of organisations and individuals, public health consultants strive to realise ways of making our communities and our environments healthier, and more capable of providing us with what we need for optimal health.

They are ‘upstream thinkers’ – preventing people from being thrown into the river in the first place, rather than fishing them out downstream, coughing and spluttering.

Where do Public Health Consultants work?

Public health reaches far beyond the usual confines of NHS structures. It pulls together skills and people from a wide range of disciplines.

Public health consultants will therefore most often work for, and across, organisations to improve the health of a certain population group.

These include:

• local NHS organisations
• national and local government agencies and authorities
• the military
• the Health Protection Agency
• local community organisations
• voluntary or academic institutions and the
• World Health Organisation amongst others.

Most of those who do specialise in public health work in the public sector.

Public health consultants take on the challenge of extremely varied and sometimes unpredictable workloads. You will usually be working on more than one project, and you'll have to respond to emergencies that arise - whether it is a crisis in the provision of healthcare services or managing the effects of an environmental hazard or infectious disease.

As a Public Health Consultant you can expect to enjoy a highly varied career, with the satisfaction of knowing that your work can have a lasting impact on improving people's health and tackling the causes of ill health. Training is flexible and encourages individuals to identify areas of interest and develop them.

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This site was last updated 14-03-2009