Public Health

The public health White Paper Healthy lives, healthy people: our strategy for public health in England sets out the government’s long-term vision for public health in England. It outlines the government’s overall approach to public health reform highlighting the need for change to a decentralised structure in order to improve public health outcomes although the detail on specific initiatives is yet to come.

What this means for the workforce
Skills for Health has been working in a number of areas within the public health arena including the creation of new roles, job opportunities and apprenticeships; new ways of working including the family nurse partnership; the new Single Work Programme; adult social care; children and young people’s health; transitions across services and the role of informal carers among others.

Delivering the government’s public health aspirations will require a well skilled and competent workforce, which includes not just public health specialists but also the wider workforce across health and social care. Skills for Health have worked closely with the public health community to develop a range of resources that will support workforce and skills development including:

• A suite of National Occupational Standards that cover a wide range of public health functions and which will support competence-based workforce development and design
• A Public Health Skills and Career Framework which provides a route map for careers in public health regardless of starting and intended end points recognising the diverse nature of the public health workforce
• The development of a suite of transferable role templates for the specialist alcohol workforce. Skills for Health Transferable Role Templates methodology can provide a way of supporting new ways of working across public health
• A health visiting career framework in the West Midlands.

Skills for Health has statutory membership of the Public Health Workforce Advisory Group.

Resources
A number of resources have been developed through work with public health stakeholders.
These include:

• The West Midlands Health Visiting Career Framework
• The Public Health Online Resource for Careers, Skills and Training
• The Durham, Darlington and Tees PCTs Model for Public Health Training.

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Some policies, strategies and guidance were developed under the previous government and as such may be subject to review by the Coalition Government.