Creating healthier futures

I have been a Director of Public Health (DPH) for nine years and, for the last few years, I have also been the national policy lead for infants, children, and young people (ICYP) for ADPH. As part of this work, I have chaired the Project Advisory Group (PAG) for a three-year ICYP project, funded by The Health Foundation, which set out to create stronger relationships between different professionals across the children’s sector.

We have achieved a tremendous amount through the project team, including setting up a training programme for public health teams on adversity, trauma, and resilience (ATR), a key challenge we are all facing locally. ATR can feel so big that it’s hard to see what we can realistically do about it, but coming together with partners was useful in thinking through a clear direction. We started off with really breaking down ATR, sharing examples of programmes and initiatives from different areas and looking at how we can start to build these into our strategies.

This was so helpful for our members that we decided to create a three-part training programme on ATR, which we were lucky enough to be able to secure Dr Warrin Larken, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, to lead. The sessions explored ATR in an accessible and practical way, focusing on integrating tools like trauma-informed practice into our work. The feedback from these sessions was excellent, with members telling us that it had helped to picture a way forward for them and their teams.

We then channelled all this learning into resources for partners to use in their work. This included the publication of a new What Good Looks Like guide on addressing ATR and a joint position statement with the Institute for Health Visiting, and the School and Public Health Nurses Association, focused on the role of health visitors and school nurses in safeguarding. These resources have helped to support teams to improve their practice while also making sure their approach aligns with what we’re doing at a national level.

I think these examples show the beauty of partner collaboration. It was a group of my peers with varying levels of experience and opinions, but all with an interest in tackling some of the “wicked issues” we are all dealing with in our local areas, and bringing all this knowledge into one room. From this shared thinking and learning, I was able to take forward our ideas from partner discussions into key meetings and conversations with the Government. This includes being on a Department for Education policy advisory group for children and young people’s mental health, Department for Health and Social Care 0-19 quality improvement forum and helping to shape the national Child Poverty Strategy to support fairer life chances for ICYP.

But as much as knowledge exchange was a strength of the project, it was also one of my biggest challenges as Chair of the project group. I had a leadership role, but I also needed to facilitate these discussions and needed to be inclusive in respecting the views and priorities of my colleagues, even when they differed from my own.

Even if you don’t necessarily agree, it’s important to recognise that all perspectives are valid and help shape a holistic solution – in public health there is never one solution to the complex problems we tackle.

This is the art of Public Health. We advocate for evidence and data to inform actions, but we also can’t improve public health outcomes on our own – we have to influence and collaborate to make progress. ICYP will always be a priority for the public, local public health teams, local Councils and leaders, and the national Government, but if the political narrative changes, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of thinking about how we frame the problem we are trying to solve. That is why it is so crucial we keep coming together to drive this direction and frame the ICYP narrative in ways that it will always be seen as a priority area for change.