Member blog: Tessa Lindfield

I had a long and winding road to becoming a Director of Public Health (DPH) but now I am here I can’t think of anything I would rather do. This is a job with some independence yet part of a team, structured but full of surprises, and scientific but creative all at the same time. You never have one day the same as another. 

I was one of the early specialty trainees in public health with a background other than medicine. I had been a Speech and Language Therapist for 15 years and had found myself becoming more and more specialist in my career. I had emigrated to Australia and was running an assistive technology service for a large charity, working with people of all ages across New South Wales who needed a technological solution to steering a wheelchair, managing their environment, and/or using a computer, or for communication. My particular expertise was severe communication disability after a brain injury. The work was great, but I couldn’t see a next step for me career wise. 

My journey to public health, although I didn’t know what public health was at the time, was inspired by two things. The unfairness of health care for uninsured or remote communities, and seeing firsthand the life changing consequences of conditions that were preventable. I was frustrated by the effort required in helping one person at a time when it felt as if it would be better spent making things fairer and preventing brain injury in the first place. I was hiding out in the library one day and I read the Black report, nearly 20 years after it was published, and the penny dropped. Public Health was where I needed to go next. 

I returned to the UK to do some locum work to fund a Master’s in Public Health in Melbourne, but one Wednesday there was an advert for the public health training scheme in the Guardian.  And before I knew it, I was a public health trainee in London. 

It felt like a real privilege being part of a developing scheme helping to shape multidisciplinary public health training. I had been in the first year of comprehensive schooling as an 11 year old, and it felt a bit the same, as if everyone was checking how you were going to turn out, fingers crossed that it would be OK.  

I was never 100% sure where this would take me and I have been lucky enough to do some work overseas both during my training and afterwards. Working in different systems gives you a richer understanding both of the art of the possible and an appreciation of what happens when essential elements of a programme are missing. There is more than one way to skin a cat as the saying goes!  

We have quite a distinct system of public services in the UK and there is a risk of forgetting there are other ways of operating, and lessons to learn from elsewhere. As I tackled our business continuity plans in case of a cyber-attack, I was grateful of the experience of leading a quality improvement project in a place with no internet, or indeed electricity much of the time, using paper based systems and tally counts.    

I have enjoyed being a DPH in different organisations, urban and rural, county, metropolitan and unitary, covering single and multiple areas. The DPH community has been invaluable in keeping me connected and informed, having people who understand the challenge and potential isolation of the role.    

My favourite part of my job is mentoring other DsPH. I really love hearing how people rise to the challenge of this role and bring all sorts of skills and abilities into play. Of course, it’s not all beer and skittles (in fact I don’t think there has been any actual beer and skittles in my DPH jobs!) and I like playing my part in a supportive community of professionals helping people find solutions to the issues that are bothering them. 

My current role combines public health and public protection, an opportunity to rebuild our historic links with environmental health and get into the nitty gritty of housing quality and community safety. The opportunities for synergy are growing and we add value to each other’s work.  There is always an interesting challenge round the corner, and that’s the very best part of being a DPH, it is very difficult to get bored!