Municipal public health officials and the Public Health Act

Heidi Lyshol

doi:10.7577/sjvd.1796

Abstract

Introduction: The Norwegian Public Health Act of 2012 was intended to give the municipalities a bigger stake in the health of the population by emphasizing public health at a municipal level. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of the Act on public health officials in the execution of their vocational roles.Research questions: How do public health officials in Norwegian municipalities balance the requirements of the new Public Health Act and what their local leaders, both politicians and bureaucrats, want? How do they use the Act in the performance of their vocational roles? Does this have any relevance for vocational teachers? Method :After a literature search, semi-formal interviews were conducted with 13 municipal public health officials who were also given practical tasks and short questionnaires. The interview transcripts were analysed using Thematic Analysis. This qualitative research technique is defined and described. Discussion and Results: The study shows that the public health workers see the Act as a useful tool and actively use it to leverage the public health field into greater importance. They feel that the Act is empowering, gives them greater pride in their work, and that it helps both them and their superiors to achieve greater understanding of public health workers’ roles in their municipalities. Using the informants’ own words, changes in the municipal public health workers’ roles and vocational self-definitions are discussed in the context of the new Act and selections from the relevant literature. Conclusion: The Public Health Act has changed the roles of municipal public health workers and helped them to further public health by giving them more responsibility and expanded their duty to safeguard health in all policies. The Act is seen as empowering, giving public health professionals pride in their work and greater role understanding, and should be heavily featured in the curriculum of future public health workers.

Highlights

The Norwegian Public Health Act of 2012 was intended to give the municipalities a bigger stake in the health of the population by emphasizing public health at a municipal level
This paper demonstrates that public health professionals in this material perceive a similar change in themselves, driven by the Public Health Act
The transcripts show that on the whole, the interviewed public health professionals appreciate the Act and the way it pinpoints the added responsibility that the municipalities have for public health, as described in Nystad (2015), who emphasizes that the Act adds something new, though it was already required that the municipalities should keep public health in mind in municipal plans All the same, some of the informants feel that they are relatively alone in their work, and that it may be a struggle to get the overall target of public health in all policies to be included all contexts

Summary

Introduction

The Norwegian Public Health Act of 2012 was intended to give the municipalities a bigger stake in the health of the population by emphasizing public health at a municipal level. Discussion and Results: The study shows that the public health workers see the Act as a useful tool and actively use it to leverage the public health field into greater importance. They feel that the Act is empowering, gives them greater pride in their work, and that it helps both them and their superiors to achieve greater understanding of public health workers’ roles in their municipalities. Using the informants’ own words, changes in the municipal public health workers’ roles and vocational self-definitions are discussed in the context of the new Act and selections from the relevant literature. Less formal changes have taken place in Norway recently in the introduction of the Public Health Act (NMHCS, 2012), which moves decisions and responsibilities to a lower level in the Norwegian context, and to an unprecedented degree gives municipalities the responsibility for their citizens’ public health

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Conclusion