Member blog: Claire Beynon
One of the things I enjoyed about moving into the Executive Director role is the autonomy of working with the team to decide our priorities. I am pleased that we have established our vision of ‘reducing health inequalities and improving the health and wellbeing of our population’. We will achieve this by focussing on three areas – increasing vaccination rates, reducing levels of smoking and improving the number of people living with a healthy weight. Our vaccination uptake tells us that we need to work harder to reach groups of people who have lower uptake. For example, by taking our services out to where people live and work to make it more convenient for people to attend and making it easy to access information (including in their preferred languages and formats). As for our work on addressing obesity, this requires a whole system approach, and it is essential that we work in partnership to achieve our collective vision to help make the healthy choice the easy choice in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan.
Claire Beynon
Executive Director of Public Health
I started the role as Executive Director of Public Health (DPH) for Cardiff and Vale University Health Board (CAVUHB) in December 2023 and it has been a very busy and enjoyable 14 months. I started my career working in Local Authority and NHS commissioning services, before moving into the Gateway to Leadership Programme and joining the NHS in a senior role. I then completed my public health training, which was an excellent experience, and then took on a role as a Consultant in Public Health before moving to CAVUHB as Deputy Director of Public Health. The Deputy role was a fabulous experience and I had great support from the Executive Director at the time, as well as the wider team, so when the opportunity came about for a new Executive Director I jumped at it and was thrilled to be appointed.
One of the things I enjoyed about moving into the Executive Director role is the autonomy of working with the team to decide our priorities. I am pleased that we have established our vision of ‘reducing health inequalities and improving the health and wellbeing of our population’. We will achieve this by focussing on three areas: increasing vaccination rates, reducing levels of smoking, and improving the number of people living with a healthy weight.
We know we need to work harder to reach groups of people who have lower uptake of vaccines. For example, by taking our services out to where people live and work to make it more convenient for people to attend and making it easy to access information (including in their preferred languages and formats). As for our work on addressing obesity, this requires a whole system approach, and it is essential that we work in partnership to achieve our collective vision to help make the healthy choice the easy choice.
Here in Wales, Public Health is based within the NHS (rather than in Local Authorities as in England), so I have opportunity to work closely with other Executive Directors in the NHS. One example of where I am focussing attention at the moment is working closely with Primary Care and building strong partnerships to make the case for shifting focus towards preventative and value-based approaches and I am excited to see where this work takes us in the coming months.
One really important factor in improving health and wellbeing over the long-term is recognising that creating healthy conditions for our children and young people can have lasting impacts. My annual report for 2024 focusses on the early years and we worked closely with our Youth Forum to develop it. Implementing the recommendations we’ve made by working in partnership will contribute to tackling the health inequalities that we know impacts on families and our communities.
As well as my Executive Director role, I am passionate and committed to supporting the next generation of public health leaders and make time to teach and share my learning and experience with others.
ADPH has been a great support to me to help me develop my career too. I have used the ADPH mentoring programme myself to support my transition into this role and would encourage other new Directors of Public Health to take this opportunity too because only by sharing our experiences and learning from each other can we progress and be the best that we can be!