Public Health Explored

An understanding of public health has never been more important!

There has been a growing interest in public health, driven by concerns for social justice and sustainability, but it is currently in the headlines as never before. The failure of governments to get to grips with the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated widespread ignorance of the basics of a public health approach to threats to health and well-being.

Relevant to all interested individuals but particularly students and professionals within nursing, medicine, social work and public health, this book encourages critical debate and reflection to develop a deep understanding of the complexities of public health issues. It offers 50 powerful stories and sayings around public health that could just change the world! Accompanied by searching questions for discussion and case studies that provide context and link each aphorism to a key event or theme, important messages around public health are extracted and explored.

Introduction 

Section 1: Concepts

1. Defining the problem
2. On forgetting your principles
3. The world is a fast flowing river
4. Elephants on a train in Africa
5. Elephants and the prevention of infant deaths
6. Eating an elephant
7. The age of Hygieia
8. William Morris on health
9. ‘Doing health’: reclaiming the ‘H’ word
10. Foreseeing and forestalling

Section 2: Issues

11. A fish is the last one to see the water
12. Not invented here
13. Listen to the community
14. Beware of healthism
15. Go to the people
16. Conspiracies against the laity
17. We’re doing it already
18. Prophets are never recognised in their own country
19. Professionals should be on tap not on top
20. Primum non Nocere

Section 3: Getting to go

21. Less is usually more
22. Starting where they are
23. Don’t follow the yellow brick road
24. Caveat emptor
25. Community organisers beware
26. Self fulfilling prophecy kills
27. Politics is medicine on a large scale
28. Columbus on the need for strategy
29. Starting a rumour
30. Edwin Chadwick and The Times

Section 4: Making a difference

31. The half-life of evidence
32. Proof and evidence
33. The art and science of public health
34. On strategic underview
35. The hidden health care system
36. Be careful what you are selling
37. The conspiracy of silence
38. Achieving change
39. Let the dough rise slowly
40. A sense of place

Section 5: Reflections

41. Public health is an investment
42. William Henry Duncan’s establishment
43. On growing potatoes
44. Life and risk
45. The importance of humour
46. Killing with kindness
47. Every silver lining has a cloud
48. Making things happen
49. Success and failure
50. The dilemma of capital cities

John Ashton is one of Britain’s foremost public health consultants whose footprint is to be found on many of the most innovative public health initiatives of the last 40 years. Born in Liverpool, John was educated at the University of Newcastle Medical School and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, before returning to the north west where he was a pioneer of the New Public Health. In the 1980s he led work on health promotion, reducing teenage pregnancy, establishing the first large-scale syringe exchange programme in the face of epidemics of heroin injection and the arrival of the HIV virus, and was one of the originators of the World Health Organisation Healthy Cities Project, now a global programme. John has always bridged the worlds of academia and practice. He is acknowledged as a first-class communicator and inspirational teacher. He has been adviser to the Crown Prince of Bahrain’s Covid-19 Taskforce and wrote a book on the pandemic. John was awarded the CBE in 2000 for contributions to the NHS.