Public health has a language problem

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 meant.

For those of you working in public health, I bet you won’t be particularly surprised if I told you that I’d come across phrases including “proactively maximize multidisciplinary ideas” and “intrinsically harness professional methodologies” in a strategy document, would you? I’m certain you’ve read similar elsewhere. You may have even given yourself indigestion by writing something like that yourself.

The truth is that I didn’t actually read those phrases in a strategy, they were from an online random corporate bullshit generator. But that is what we sound like…

When I began my public health career in a local authority in 2016 I’d happily floated through life without ever using the word ‘stakeholder’. On joining I was immediately smacked across the chops by corporate jargon. I thought it might have just been the culture of that council, or that perhaps public health became infected with management speak after the 2013 transition to local authorities. But it predates…