Public Health

During the last 10 years, preventative approaches to health have been a central component of UK health policy. Understanding how to prevent avoidable deaths and promote good health and wellbeing amongst populations is an important goal in helping people live happy, healthy and fulfilling lives, whilst limiting increasing long-term costs to the NHS system. The key is understanding where health problems exist, who is affected, and what preventative strategies and services can be implemented to improve health and wellbeing. Research can play a vital role at each of these stages.

There are a range of possible areas for public health research, with a variety of possible methodologies that can be tailored to these challenges:

• Quantitative surveys can identify the scale of health problems and differing levels of knowledge, as well as explore the array of health or lifestyle related attitudes and behaviour
• Tracking surveys can be used to establish changes in public behaviours over time and evaluate the impact of public health interventions or changes to service provision
• Iterative social marketing research – involving a blend of innovative qualitative research supported with quantitative methods – can segment target populations to help understand what moves and motivates populations to behave in certain ways and which services are required to facilitate preventative health behaviours
• Stakeholder interviews or action planning workshops can gather expert experience and opinion about public health priorities, challenges and opportunities
• Structured literature reviews – incorporating published articles and reports, policy documents, unpublished evaluation reports and quantitative data sets – can help understand current health behaviours of a population and their needs
• Evaluation research can help understand what works, what does not work and what needs to be done better to improve public health throughout society

Public health organisations face the difficult challenge of making evidence-based decisions about the provision of services that meet local needs. Thoughtful research and innovative approaches to analysis and reporting will help you understand the complexity of these challenges simply, and make these crucial decisions effectively.