What is Public Health?

The World Health Organization says "Public health refers to all organized measures (whether public or private) to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among the population as a whole. Its activities aim to provide conditions in which people can be healthy and focus on entire populations, not on individual patients or diseases." 

Health improvement

Health improvement is focused on promoting the health of populations and tackling what we call the underlying, or social determinants of health such as housing, education and employment.

Health protection

Health protection is focused on protecting the population from major incidents (including threats from the environment, chemicals and radiation), infection and communicable disease.

Healthcare public health

Healthcare public health is focused on improving the quality of healthcare systems, ensuring the use of evidence based clinical practice and health economics.

Typical jobs in public health

Public health covers a vast range of jobs, including those which may: 

• work with specific groups of people in roles such as community engagement officers or workplace health advisors
• work in a specialist field of health promotion such as in tobacco control, alcohol, public health intelligence or sexual health
• specialise exclusively within one of the three domains of public health, for example in screening and immunisation working within the field of health protection

Public health staff can also have more generic roles as public health practitioners and public health specialists where they oversee and advise on broad portfolios of work that cut across all three domains of public health.

See Working in public health for more information about the generic roles that usually exist within Local Authorities.