Better Health For All

The second Wessex Public Health Conference, to be held on March 15th at St Mary’s Football Ground in Southampton, poses the question ‘Are we getting serious about prevention?’, as per the Five Year Forward View and the NHS Long-Term Plan.

Our annual conference draws colleagues from across the breadth of the public health
community in Hampshire, Dorset, Isle of Wight and Channel Islands, including staff in local authorities, NHS services and academics from our local universities. The conference is organised by a Wessex-wise public health collaboration and is led by Health Education England (HEE) and this year we have been greatly
oversubscribed with 250 delegates confirmed to attend.

The conference themes pose critical questions to our professional community. Are we doing enough to act on basic needs, mitigating the effects of poverty and ensuring access to basic requirements of food, clean air and housing? What are the threats and opportunities in public mental health and what more should we be doing? Given our skills in system leadership how can we use these to influence the direction of policy and service reconfiguration towards prevention? We are delighted that three eminent and influential keynote speakers have agreed to introduce the debates around
these issues:

1. Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of ‘The Inner Level: how more equal societies
   reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being’;
2. David Buck, Senior Fellow of Public Health and Inequalities at the Kings Fund;
3. Dr Julie Rugg from the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York.

We will have four streams of workshops and oral paper sessions running throughout the day, including in addition to the three above, a fourth open stream on local public health action. There was an enthusiastic response to the call for abstracts so we have a full programme of four workshops on System Leadership, Air Quality, Mental Health in Teenagers, and Housing and Homelessness; and over 30 oral presentations in other sessions. There will also be 40 posters which will be judged to award the Best Poster Prize of the day, as well as a full range of Exhibition stands.

We are also very pleased to welcome FPH President, Professor John Middleton, and FPH CEO, James Gore, who will be running a lunch time meeting for all delegates to have
the opportunity to discuss professional issues with them. Also this year we have teamed up with the Saints Foundation, the charitable arm of the football club, who will be offering lunchtime fitness activities.

The conference is seen as a key development opportunity for our Specialist Registrars, some of whom have helped in planning and ensuring that we have a clear sustainability policy to minimise the environmental effects of the conference. The planning committee has been a collaboration across our public health teams, academics and PHE colleagues and we are grateful for their involvement and all the contributions to make a success of the day.

Written by Dr Viv Speller on behalf of the Wessex Public Health Conference 2019 Planning Committee. The agenda for this year’s conference is available here.