Public Health is about helping people to stay healthy and protecting them from threats to their health.  A career in Public Health can provide you the opportunity to work in:

• Health Protection – working to protect people’s health and wellbeing such as controlling infectious disease, implementing food safety measures and planning emergency responses.
• Health Improvement – working to improve people’s health and wellbeing through activities such as behaviour change, policy research and individual and community health improvement activities
• Healthcare Public health – working at a population level by preventing disease or improving health-related outcomes through healthcare interventions or treatments.

NHS England’s Long-Term Workforce Plan (2023) sets out a strategy to grow, retain and reform the workforce over the next 15 years. This includes a plan to:

• Increase the specialist Public Health workforce by 13%
• Embed Public Health core skills and knowledge across the wider NHS workforce
• Equip the NHS workforce with he right skills and knowledge to shift care towards prevention and early intervention.

The Public Health Speciality and Practitioner programmes outlined below are just some of the opportunities to get into a formal Public Health Career, but there are also many others. Have a look at the Roles in Public Health web-pages via the following link to explore more: Roles in Public Health

If you want to discuss your Public Health career options, there are leads in Hampshire and Isle of Wight who can support you:

• Hampshire and Isle of Wight – Louise Bevan
• Portsmouth – Amanda McKenzie or Robert Anderson-Weaver
• Southampton – Anne-Marie Hankinson
• Office of Health Improvement and Disparities – Elizabeth Burchett 
• Wessex – Em Rahman or Lauren Kirk 

There are also many other people whose paid or unpaid role is not primarily concerned with Public Health but who have opportunities within their roles to support the public’s health and wellbeing.  This could include enhancing your capabilities in Making Every Contact Count (MECC), smoking cessation.  Check out our training opportunities page to further develop your skills and knowledge.

Public Health Specialists focus on health at a population level. They require skills in three domains of public health, but in practice they may specialise in one area:

• Health protection - focussing on inequalities, the wider determinants of health and factors such as alcohol, tobacco and obesity.
• Health improvement - focussing on infectious diseases, chemicals, radiation, environmental health hazards, emergency response, screening and immunisation, vaccinations and sustainability.
• Healthcare public health - focussing on ensuring services meet the population need, are planned appropriately, are of high quality and are equitable efficient.

Health Education England have a statutory responsibility for the training of public health specialists.

Find more information about the specialty training programme in Wessex here.

In the video below Public Health Registrar Christopher Johnes gives us a brief perspective of what it is like to be trained in the Public Health Specialist Training programme. Please take a watch.

Public Health Practitioners make up a core part of the public health workforce. They work across the full breadth of public health in a wide range of settings and sectors, and contribute to public health outcomes and improving health and wellbeing.

Health Education England support the development of public health practitioners through registration schemes, with the delivery of these schemes being regionally planned and delivered.

Applications for the Wessex Public Health Practitioner Scheme 2025 are now open.

Find more information about the practitioner training scheme in Wessex here.