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Health Protection

What is Health Protection?

Health Protection can be defined as: “The protection of individuals, groups and populations through expert advice and effective collaboration to prevent and mitigate the impact of infectious disease, environmental, chemical and radiological threats.”

Over the past century, there have been significant reductions in the number of deaths from traditional infectious diseases. These accounted for 32% of all deaths in 1901 compared with just 8% in 2015. As we have seen recently though with the COVID-19 pandemic, new threats from infectious diseases arise from changing socio-demographics including increased travel, immunosuppression and new types of viruses or bacteria.

Why is it important?

  • Health Protection is one of the core fields of Public Health Work, alongside health improvement and health services.
  • Infectious diseases are a significant economic burden in the UK, accounting for annual costs of £30bn in 2017, pre-pandemic. As we have seen from the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of new infectious diseases has the potential for significant impact on our health, our economy and the way we live our lives.
  • Threats to health are not equally shared; the impoverished, incarcerated, institutionalised and homeless are often at far higher risk of illness and premature mortality than the general population. Marginalised populations experience extremes of poor health due to a combination of poverty, social exclusion and increased burden of risk factors.

What are we doing?

The Collaborative hosted a joint Lancashire and South Cumbria Screening, Vaccination and Immunisation Workshop on Friday 26th January 2024 to:

  • Discuss the emerging Measles situation.
  • Explore what the data tells us about screening, vaccination and immunisation in Lancashire and South Cumbria.
  • Discuss what the data tells us about each place and identify what the key priorities might be.
  • Identify potential priorities for the Collaborative system.

We are working on implementing the actions from the workshop, more on next steps soon!

 

Leadership

Katrina Stephens, Director of Public Health for Westmorland and Furness Council is the DPH Lead for Health Protection.

More Information

You can contact the Collaborative Support Team by emailing: ellie.shackleton@blackburn.gov.uk or rebecca.ramsay@blackburn.gov.uk.

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