Better Health For All

A little over a year ago, I joined the policy & comms team at FPH with a modest knowledge of what public health is and the jobs that people working in the specialty involve. I wanted to learn as much as I could so I began by speaking to our members and asking them to explain what they do to me.

In the year since I joined FPH, I’ve met people who are achieving some truly incredible things in the UK and around the world. There’s the team in the East Midlands who, as winter approached, garnered the support of the local Red Cross and fire service and together, located a safe, warm place for homeless people to sleep. There are the teams that make sure that first responders and local communities are safe when a crisis happens, like the poisoning in Salisbury or recent terrorist attacks. And there are the people who undertake important, ground-breaking research to change the way we approach public health issues. These are just three examples; public health is so broad that it encompasses many other roles.

I wanted to find images that would bring all of this brilliance to life so a few months ago, I started hunting for photos for our new website. I wanted to celebrate public health and all the remarkable individuals that work in it.

I thought I’d be overwhelmed with choice but instead, I was disappointed with the results. From an image of a stethoscope with ‘public health’ spelt out in wooden blocks to a man in a white coat holding a globe, I was confused. Had I misspelt it? After more searching, I realised that public health imagery was at best, a sorry state of affairs and this has consequences. The fact no-one can find photos that truly represent public health has on a knock-on effect to the way it’s perceived. It means the public don’t understand what we do, decision-makers confuse public health with healthcare, and policy-makers sometimes overlook us despite the fact that we add a huge amount of value.

When I thought back to the people I’d met and the stories they’d told me, my mind conjured up many different images including: teams of people working together to keep others safe; people in haz-mat suits, the emergency services, academics, volunteers working in conflict zones; public health interventions like the smoking ban and pay-as-you-go bike schemes; public health challenges that communities work together to tackle like floods, fires and disease outbreaks.

So why weren’t these photos coming up in the results? All of this made me realise three things:

1. The public health community needs to do more to celebrate itself – we know we have an incredible story to tell so we need to start sharing it
2. We need to get better at explaining what people working in public health do and achieve in a simple way
3. There’s a golden opportunity to achieve 1 and 2 by asking our members and other public health heroes to help us by taking photos of what they think ‘public health looks like’ through their eyes

That’s why we’ve launched a photo competition to do just that. We know that public health encompasses many kinds of people, professions and places so in a way, it’s not surprising that the photos in image libraries are so poor- public health is a behemoth but it’s one we’re immensely proud of! We know there’s a wealth of photos out there waiting to be taken so to help us tell a compelling story about public health, we want you to take them.

It’s an exciting opportunity for so many reasons, not least because the photos will be used on our new website which is the ‘shop window’ for public health. But in my mind, the most important reason to enter is this: you could help us change policy. We’ve already started campaigning for increased funding for public health teams in local authorities and prevention in the NHS but if we’re going to succeed, we – as the public health community – need to get better at demonstrating our value.

By taking a photo that represents what public health looks like to you, you’ll help us do just that because inspiring images will help us showcase how special it is. In turn, this will help to unite the wider health community to get behind the need to invest in public health, and will pique the interest of policy-makers.

So please enter our photo competition by clicking here and encourage work friends and people you know who are passionate about photography to do the same. If you’ve got any questions, you can tweet us @FPH or email photocomp@fph.org.uk. In the meantime, keep an eye on our Twitter page and blog for competition updates.

Written by Haidee O’Donnell, Senior Media & Comms Officer, FPH.