Better Health For All

Even though I’ve been a Public Health Registrar for 3 years, I confess I’d never really engaged with the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) — the body that designs and manages the public health training scheme — other than when I had to, e.g. when taking my exams. So when I saw an opportunity to complete some of my training with FPH on their ‘Public Health Funding Campaign’ I genuinely had no idea what this would involve. The project seemed noble: ‘making the case to the UK Government to increase spending on prevention.’ However, I must admit I was initially sceptical about what FPH could hope to achieve.

This changed when I saw the impact of the Brexit ‘Do No Harm’ campaign undertaken by my fellow registrars and FPH’s Policy & Communications team. Though the FPH team may be small in terms of capacity and resource, the amazing work carried out earlier this year to ensure that Brexit will ‘do no harm’ to the public’s health demonstrates what a committed team with an important public health cause can achieve.

FPH’s Public Health Funding campaign is focusing on three main areas of relevance to public health system funding: innovation and transformation funding for local authority public health teams, prevention in the NHS, and a new dashboard for measuring public health outcomes. I have been appointed to take the lead on the ‘prevention in the NHS’ work stream.

This project appealed to me for several reasons. Firstly, this work is about national policy making, whereas many of our other training placements have a local focus so for me, it’s great experience that I struggled to find elsewhere.

Secondly, there couldn’t be a better time for those of us in public health to start thinking seriously about what the NHS can do to better deliver prevention. As Theresa May outlined in her recent speech on the NHS budget, prevention will be a priority area for the NHS’s long-term plan. The Prime Minister was right when she said that “a renewed focus on prevention will reduce pressures on the NHS,” and the opportunity to potentially contribute to that effort and help the NHS better define its prevention role for its next 70 years doesn’t come around that often.

And thirdly, it’s a project I genuinely believe in. For some, ‘the money’ bit of public health may not be as interesting as the ‘service delivery’ or ‘wider determinants’ bits. But to me — and clearly to the FPH senior fellows who chose this project topic — properly resourcing our public health teams is paramount if we are to achieve all of our aspirations for the health and wellbeing of the public.

And there are worrying trends. With the ring fence due to be removed from the public health grant in just a few short years, commitment to invest in public health for the future is no sure thing. Worryingly, nearly 75% of FPH members who work in local authorities have told us that they don’t have enough resource to deliver all that is being asked of them. At a time when we have rising rates of non-communicable disease and an ageing population, preventing illness should be a priority reflected on the bottom line. It’s prudent both financially and for the health of the population.

Evidence shows that spending less money on prevention costs the NHS and other public services more in the long term. As a UK taxpayer, I want to know where all this money is being spent and whether it is being used wisely. As a future public health consultant, I want to make sure this money is spent on evidence-based and cost-effective measures to maximise public health. Hopefully by the end of my project with FPH next June, I’ll be able to say that I contributed to those above aims.

In the meantime, I am already enjoying working with a fantastic team on a project full of opportunities to develop myself and hopefully benefit the public’s health. Please stay tuned to the FPH blog and follow FPH on Twitter to hear more about my and the team’s progress. If you wish to comment, contribute, or donate to the campaign please contact policy@fph.org.uk or visit the public health funding page of the FPH website by clicking here.

Written by Ahmed Razavi, Specialty Registrar in Public Health.