Understanding the public health practitioner workforce report

The Centre for Workforce Intelligence (CfWI) has published the report: “Understanding the public health practitioner workforce”.

This report was jointly commissioned by the Department of Health (DH), Health Education England (HEE) and Public Health England (PHE) to gather information on the public health practitioner workforce in England. The study is to inform and support stakeholder decisions relating to the future of the public health practitioner workforce and their impact on population health and wellbeing.

The report includes a summary of the regulatory bodies responsible for members of this workforce, a proposed definition of a ‘public health practitioner’ for use in future discussions and workforce planning, and examples of the roles filled by public health practitioners.

Through a mixture of stakeholder interviews and desk research, this CfWI study has found:

Practitioners may come from a wide variety of backgrounds, with a mixture of qualifications. Some may belong to registered professions, but many do not.
As a result, there is a broad range of job titles and definitions in use to describe the role of a public health practitioner, with no consistency across or even within sectors.
There are also multiple routes for becoming a practitioner and for developing a career as a practitioner; some undergo further training to become a public health specialist but for most there is no linear career progression.
Due to the diverse nature of the workforce, data on workforce numbers for public health practitioners is sparse. Counting the practitioner workforce at a local and national level would help employers and policymakers to make decisions on service planning.
Practitioner registration schemes have mixed backing from stakeholders.
Better understanding of the practitioner workforce will help the system to manage the financial and demand pressures that are being identified in other CfWI public health studies.

Read the report

Losing in the long run report is published

Losing in the Long Run report, produced by Action for Children in partnership with the National Children’s Bureau and The Children’s Society, calls for a renewed commitment from Government to vital early intervention services that support children, young people, and families.

It shows that although local councillors believe in the value of early intervention services, they are concerned that maintaining spending on services, like children’s centres, will get more challenging.

The report asks whether further reductions are sustainable and desirable, providing evidence from local councillors, young people and parents about the value of early intervention, and the impact that funding reductions have on the availability of these services locally.

Go to Losing in the Long Run report

iHV welcomes Mental Health Taskforce report

The independent Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS in England publishes its report today – The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health.

The taskforce gives a frank assessment of the state of current mental health care across the NHS, highlighting that one in four people will experience a mental health problem in their lifetime and the cost of mental ill-health to the economy, NHS and society is £105bn a year.

In response to this report, NHS England has committed to the biggest transformation of mental health care across the NHS in a generation, pledging to help more than a million extra people and investing more than a billion pounds a year by 2020/21.

Dr Cheryll Adams, Executive Director of the iHV, said:

“The Institute very much welcomes this wide ranging report and hopes that indeed it will attract the promised funding of £1billion. We are very pleased that perinatal mental health has again been singled out as a mental health priority.”

One in five mothers suffers from mental health problems during pregnancy or in the first year after childbirth. It costs around £8.1 billion for each annual birth cohort or almost £10,000 per birth. Yet fewer than 15% of areas have the necessary perinatal mental health services and more than 40% provide none at all.

The report suggests that new funding should be invested to support at least 30,000 more women each year to access evidence-based specialist mental health care in the perinatal period.

The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health Report

Celebrating Progress – Nursing Division Health Visitor Service Transformation Projects for England

NHS England allocated service transformation funding (as part of the national Health Visitor delivery plan) 2013 and 2014 to all Area Teams and as a result, some 42 projects were delivered.

The ‘Celebrating Progress – Nursing Division Health Visitor Service Transformation Projects for England’ report provides an overview of the funding process and project development. It presents summaries of the projects in order to illustrate the types of initiatives that were delivered, and the impact they have had on service provision, along with a means of sharing best practice, learning and resources available

This report is dedicated to providing a compendium of the projects outlining the project plan, partners, deliverables, impact (or expected impact), resources for sharing and contact details of project leads to facilitate sharing of best practice across the system.