Better Health For All

Since its foundation, the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) and the organisations from which it was built have advanced public health standards, which is done on the basis of continuously evolving knowledge of what constitutes best practice and policy. In turn, this knowledge is based on the best quantitative and qualitative evidence available. The nature of this evidence has also evolved. Controlled, and, where feasible, randomised trials are now the source of a great deal of the best evidence about what works, what doesn’t and what represents good value for money. The health of the public now relies on such evidence.

Perhaps the main role of FPH and of its parent Royal Colleges with regard to evidence is to make sure it is infused into the professional lives of their members and fellows and is applied – through the curriculum, through career advancing membership and fellowship examinations and assessments, through courses, training standards and wider CPD, through journals and policy statements, and through their networks of advisors. This function is often called evidence mobilisation.

Importantly, FPH also provides powerful incentives to excel – prestigious and eponymous prizes for example. These are often awarded for excellence in evaluation and development and then, through personal example, for pioneering and promoting better practice and policy based on this.

FPH and RCP (The Royal Colleges of Physicians) also provide welcoming professional homes – attractive environments in which practitioners and policy makers engage with the latest evidence and guidance and decide how it might inform and change their practice.

But this Royal College model of continuous improvement was not adopted by some other professions until very recently. It seems astonishing that until 2014 there was no such institution for the police, and until 2016, no professional body for teachers in primary and secondary education.

Since evidence has come a long way in the last few decades across all of these policy areas, it seemed to me that a declaration on evidence, signed by the relevant professional bodies, would strengthen a culture of evidence-informed policy and practice in these institutions and in the professional lives of their members and fellows.

As an honorary fellow of FPH and a member of FPH’s Academic & Research Committee, I drafted this declaration and then took it through the boards of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the Chartered College of Teaching and the College of Policing. It was signed by leaders of all the Royal Colleges and police and teaching institutions at the Royal Society on 7 November 2017. This event was facilitated by the Alliance for Useful Evidence and chaired by the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord O’Donnell. The Faculty president, Professor John Middleton, signed for FPH.

The signing ceremony at the Royal Society*

This declaration signals FPH expectations of all its members and fellows with regard to evidence and also signals its commitment to support high quality evaluation.

At the signing event at the Royal Society I introduced the declaration and commented that:

This is a unique meeting of leaders of professional bodies in healthcare, teaching and policing. Teachers, police officers, doctors and dentists make up a sizable proportion of the UK workforce. The influence of the institutions represented here extends to more than one million professionals across the UK and more widely. This event is testament to the great importance of evidence for our professions and for the public we all serve.

*The people featured in the photo are:

Front row, left to right, Chief Constable Ian Hopkins, director, College of Policing; Professor Carrie MacEwen, chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges; Dame Alison Peacock, chief executive, Chartered College of Teaching. Back row, left to right, Lord O’Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary; Professor Jonathan Shepherd, declaration author; Jonathan Breckon, director, Alliance for Useful Evidence.

Written by Jonathan Shepherd, professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at Cardiff University. Jonathan is a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Academy of Medical Sciences, and is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. He is a member of the Home Office Science Advisory Council and the What Works Council at the UK Cabinet Office.