Where are you now?
I am the Director of Public Health at East Sussex County Council, just down the road from Falmer at County Hall, Lewes. I have been here for a year now, and previously held consultant posts in Wiltshire and Berkshire, including working as Acting Director across several Berkshire councils for eight months. I was accepted on to the Public Health Training Scheme in London while I was part way through my MSc at BSMS, which I began when I was working locally in Horsham for the district council and Primary Care Trust in a joint health improvement role.
Public health training is a multidisciplinary affair, with an almost 50:50 balance of registrars from medicine and those from other disciplines. My first degree is in architecture, and with an arts background, I am about as far from medicine as you can be, and yet both the MSc and training programme were able to motivate me and enable me to weave this background into my learning.
What has been your proudest moment?
I was recently asked to coordinate a visit to Hastings by the new Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, where I was able to show him some of the assets and challenges that co-exist in this very special East Sussex town. The visit enabled me to make real the wide number of determinants of health that are social, economic or environmental in origin, which, when impacting on a whole population, can directly lead to demand for NHS services.