Member blog: Glen Wilson

I’m often asked about my background and how I got into public health.  For many years my response always started with something along the lines of my journey being unusual or not typical.  It took me a while to truly realise there is no such thing as ‘normal’ routes into a career in public health and that this is what enriches and maintains the specialty that we all love.

My early training was in Biomedical Sciences followed by research in defence science and technology.  From there I moved into roles focussed around the translation of evidence to practice relating largely to drugs and medicines, with a particular focus on the safe use of medicines through pregnancy.  While not discernible public health roles, the principles of developing and applying the evidence base to population health eventually led to my discovery of specialty training in public health, a seemingly well-hidden path for outsiders at the time!

Following specialty training I worked for six years as regional Screening & Immunisation Lead working with Public Health England and NHS England across the North East and North Cumbria.  I moved to my current role in local government with Durham County Council in 2021, where I particularly enjoy working across a broad range of topics, focused on improving outcomes in the local community.

Like many in public health, one of my driving motivations is to tackle the inherent unfairness in opportunity and outcome that surrounds us all.  I firmly believe that to effectively tackle health inequalities we need to work in partnership, and for those partnerships to be effective, we need to simplify and demystify what can sound like the impossible or intangible.  Data and evidence must underpin our approaches, but there is a further need for developing a compelling ‘so what’ and deliverable call to action.  We took that approach in our new Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy, which has helped gain traction and understanding of the importance of action across the drivers of inequality, with particular emphasis on the wider determinants of health.

The theme of translating data and evidence to drive change is crucial and complements the need for a culture of continuous quality improvement; challenging ourselves and partners to go further to address some of the real challenges facing our local populations. Our recent Director of Public Health Annual Report shines a light on the unfair and avoidable impacts of some of the challenges we need to address together with an asset based focus on system level action to drive improvement.

It isn’t all about using data and evidence though.  Sometimes the evidence is limited or doesn’t answer the question we need to answer.  Another area of interest and something I am lucky to be able to pursue in County Durham is building our capacity to develop the evidence base.  Working in partnership with our local university and voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisation we have established REACH County Durham, our approach to building corporate and community involvement in delivering locally relevant research activity to inform better decision making.

None of the challenges we face have quick solutions and there is an ever present need to grow the workforce and public health leaders of the future.  Again, we are really fortunate locally to have created our Public Health Skills Development Centre, with a range of related opportunities for people across all stages of their career development.  On a personal level as an educational supervisor and Faculty of Public Health Membership Examiner, ongoing commitment to educational development is an important part of the role, which it has been great to be able to complement with the design and development of innovative new opportunities within the team.

It’s important to also look beyond local, and even the strong regional networks across the North East, particularly in the face of complex and interconnected issues.  This is where the value of ADPH membership really comes into play, with both the formal and informal opportunities to interface, to share best practice, and to learn from others with experiences working in similar and different contexts.  One of my areas of leadership is around mental health and suicide prevention, the latter being particularly emotive and requiring effective engagement with partners, including elected members.  Access to the ADPH network is invaluable in terms of being a source of advice, support, and sense checking.