The Public Health Professional: finding a voice

Both public health as a concept and the public health profession as an identity have long been in a state of flux; constantly being formed and reformed. While the role has always been loosely defined in terms of ‘prevention’, both the inputs and the measurement of health and economic outputs have been varied, have changed dramatically over time, and have often spanned organisational and jurisdictional boundaries. A management accountant’s nightmare. So how are such activities controlled? How are interventions strategized? And how can we establish value for money?

These are questions commonly asked in public sector accounting and policy research. What makes public health especially interesting, both in terms of accountability and professional identity, are the changes coming from the 2012 Health and Social Care Act that bring public health back into local government after 40 years in the NHS. The entire organisational environments of public health professionals were abolished, and teams ‘dragged and dropped’ into an entirely new (and entirely alien) landscape; that of the local authority.