This is the second of two blogs on ‘proper’ prevention, with the first on the need for a general ‘shit life reduction strategy’ and this one on what I’ve come to think of as ‘Shit Place Syndrome’. Acknowledging ‘Shit Place Syndrome’ A quick thought experiment — two people, same income…

In health terms, ‘prevention’ basically means doing stuff that reduces risks to health. Primary prevention focuses on the whole population to stop a problem occurring in the first place, for example through immunisation or discouraging smoking; secondary prevention focuses on at-risk individuals and aims to nip an issue in the…

How many of you were inspired to work in public health because you wanted to champion a sustainable place-based locality-level social movement to address the underlying upstream determinants of health agenda through a transformative bottom-up asset-based community co-production approach? Not me, because I had no idea what any of that…

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events that children can be exposed to while growing up. These include the direct impact of suffering abuse or neglect, or the indirect effects of living in a household affected by domestic violence, substance misuse or mental illness. The original ACEs study found that…

We know that most of the things that influence population health — poverty, education, the environment, transport, work, relationships, safe and comfortable homes — are not really touched by what the money marked as ‘health’ gets spent on. If we’re going to make a big impact on health, what we…

Those of us working in public health are interested in the causes of poor health and wellbeing, but also in ‘the causes of the causes’. Consider someone with coronary heart disease, for example, for which the cause is blocked arteries. But what caused the arteries to be blocked? Often, it’s…