Public Health resource
You should have already completed this resource but, if you have not, first of all please complete this resource to gain a basic understanding of what public health research is.
The NIHR have created a resource to highlight the differences between Clinical Health research, Social care research and Public health research. The resource has been developed using flashcards to help improve your basic understanding and structured to make you aware of key approaches and components in each area of research.
Public health is everything that does not happen in a health setting, private hospital or the NHS, it is not always called public health. You can find lots more information on these NIHR Pages about Public Health Research.
Most of the important improvements in health over the last century have not come from advances in clinical medicine - in fact of the 30 year increase in life expectancy, 25 years have resulted from public health measures such as clean water, sanitation and vaccination. To understand the impact of public health research and the initiatives and policies it can lead to, here are the top 20 public health interventions. These measures can be considered as secondary prevention, public health also looks at primary prevention measures such as the design of a road junction to keep drivers and passengers safe. Primary prevention attempts to change a behaviour before its occured.
The concept of what public health is and what public health professionals do is explained further here, in this video.
The NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR) is a partnership between nine leading academic centres with excellence in applied public health research in England.
The SPHR aims to increase the evidence base for cost-effective public health practice and you will find more about public health research.
Strategic Health Asset Planning and Evaluation (SHAPE) - SHAPE links national data sets, clinical analysis, public health, primary care and demographic data with information on healthcare estates performance and facilities location. This means it has information on every single school, PC and secondary healthcare facility, opticians, pharmacy, care home, children's centre, Local authority and many more services. It is free to register for an account with an NHS email address.
Top tips:
It may be useful to talk about the similarities and differences between evaluation and research, public health are more familiar with evaluation and less familiar with research.
Sometimes a public health study can end up in a different speciality or division i.e. primary care or social care.
Public Health departments do not always see the potential recruit themselves, they may commission a service and they are the ones who interact with the potential participant.
Public health don't usually see individuals, they see entire populations.
There are further resources in the awesome table
This page will develop as we understand more about public health research.