Member blog: Dominique Le Touze

In my current role as Assistant Director of Public Health for Portsmouth City Council, I am lucky to work in a city where public health is recognised not as a collection of isolated problems to be solved, but a living system of people, environments, policies, and histories.  There is recognition that meaningful and lasting change comes from understanding the whole system and from building high quality relationships with colleagues and communities to shift the structures that hold inequalities in place.

This has always been important to me. An enduring interest in how humans make meaning and the way social systems influence health and wellbeing led me to study Social Anthropology as my first degree. In the UK, and later at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, I worked with refugees and asylum seekers, researching population mental health, listening to stories that didn’t make the headlines, but should have done. At the time, all asylum seekers – adults and children – were held in the infamous Woomera detention centre, a former army base in the South Australian Outback surrounded by razor wire. The evidence we put together from those stories went on to influence national policy, and eventually the detention centre was closed.

I went on to Timor Leste to work with the Truth and Justice Commission. It was there that my supervisor said, “You know this thing that you’re interested in – using science to promote social justice and improve lives – it’s Public Health”. So I returned to London to undertake an MSc in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and later joined the wonderful Southwark Primary Care Trust public health team. From there I went on to specialty training in Wessex, eventually joining Portsmouth City Council as a Consultant in Public Health. In 2019, I joined the ADPH as an Associate member, which has been invaluable in deepening my understanding and building networks.

I have benefited from some great mentors throughout my career. Undertaking the excellent Aspiring Directors Course (now Aspiring Public Health Leaders) which supported me to develop as a systems thinker and meet some wonderful colleagues, now friends, who supported me through the pandemic and beyond! Helen Atkinson, my Director of Public Health in Portsmouth has also been an incredible mentor, demonstrating compassionate leadership daily.

Working in local government has helped me to stay close to the action, but with the levers to make visible and lasting local change, setting up the first school Superzone outside London, piloting an opt-out system for free school meal allocation and adapting care homes and schools  to mitigate the health impacts of climate change.

More recently, I’ve joined the UKHSA Centre for Climate Health and Security on secondment for one day per week. I’ve enjoyed working across local and national settings, seeing the interdependencies and opportunities for learning in each and to explore working at a national level as I consider next career steps.

Looking back, as is often the case, what seemed like a series of ‘interesting next steps’ now reveals itself as a coherent career – one driven by a desire to understand the big picture, the systems that make things happen, and people respond, the way they do, and to use that understanding to tackle the root causes of illness and address the social injustices that keep people from thriving, something which is as important today as it was when I started 25 years ago.