Working in public health

If you work in public health you can be employed in a range of organisations including hospitals, councils, universities, the civil service, the private sector and the voluntary and community sector.

There are many different roles and typical jobs can include:

Community engagement officer
Health improvement practitioner
Environmental health officer
Healthy lifestyles co-ordinator
Health and wellbeing manager
Workplace health adviser
Public health intelligence officer
Public health commissioning manager
Screening and immunisation manager
Lecturer in public health
Suicide prevention manager

These types of roles can form the starting point for more formal study and training in public health following which you could consider working towards practitioner registration, securing one of our Apprenticeships in public health or applying for our Specialty training in public health.

Our Public Health team

All councils have a public health team lead by a Director of Public Health.

In County Durham, our Public Health team includes five smaller teams:

Starting Well - focusing on factors that ensure the best start in life for our children and young people.
Living and Ageing Well - focusing on the health and wellbeing of adults and older people.
Protecting Health - ensuring the safety of our population from risks to health such as flu and Covid-19.
Community Durham Together - working with communities to ensure they are involved in decisions that affect them and their wellbeing.
Healthy Settings, Strategy and Assurance - focusing on the settings where people live, learn and play with oversight of programmes such as Better Health at Work

We also work closely with other specialist teams in the council such as our Public Health Intelligence and Commissioning teams.