Emergence of Public Health England and partnerships
Public Health England will work in partnership with local authorities, devolved administrations and NHS commissioning bodies but it is unclear how this will impact public health workforce planning and development.
Public Health England (an Executive Agency of the Department of Health) will support local authorities by providing services, expertise, information and advice to ensure action is taken on the basis of the best available evidence of what works. IT will assume functions of among other entities, the Health Protection Agency, National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse and public health observatories. It will support NHS commissioning decisions and service delivery to ensure that prevention of ill health, and promotion of good physical and mental health and wellbeing are systematically addressed. In regard to devolved administrations, it will be able to coordinate nationwide action where necessary, including working with devolved administrations to tackle threats to health, and enabling effective UK-wide emergency, resilience and response arrangements. There are, however, strong feelings that linkages to diverse public health workforces may not be maintained because of a lack of overall vision about future developments underpinned by funding deficits, which may dilute education and training delivery and future public health capacity.
Sources or references
- White Paper: Healthy Lives, Healthy People: DoH
- Working in partnership to transform the public health system (2011) DoH - see website
- Taking public health beyond NHS and local government, 19 Sept 2012, The Guardian
Some of the information in this section is provided by stakeholders and expert groups, and does not necessarily represent the views of the CfWI.
