Sparking interest in public health amongst future doctors to tackle our NHS sustainability crisis.

Fiona Wood,Rhiannon Phillips,Hannah Broughton,Duncan Cole,Cono Ariti,Behrooz Behbod,Hannah Beetham

doi:10.15694/mep.2019.000196.1

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The new NHS 'Long Term Plan' has a particular focus on the public health issues of disease prevention and reducing health inequalities. However, medical students often perceive public health as abstract and irrelevant to clinical practice. We believe students need to be encouraged to appreciate wider public health issues and ultimately be able to apply clinical and public health tools to achieve change for patients and populations. Our aim is for all medical graduates to be able to apply public health and evidence-based principles to their chosen specialties. In the undergraduate curriculum, we hope to extend problem-, case-, and simulation-based learning into public health education, emphasise the context around statistics and epidemiology teaching, and make the teaching more relevant, tangible and enjoyable. Intercalated BSc students will gain an interdisciplinary perspective by joining Master of Public Health (MPH) students to learn about the prevention and control of disease and the promotion of health and wellbeing. They will also have opportunities to join the new Health Intelligence Team (H.I.T.), on a voluntary reserve list to support Public Health Wales in the event of real investigations. We will evaluate these strategies, and we hope that medical educators worldwide will share their experience of innovative approaches to public health and evidence-based medicine teaching in response to this article, so that public health teaching may be improved.

Highlights

We have a duty of care to all patients, ensuring optimal outcomes through evidence-based prevention, diagnosis and treatment
One solution may be to emphasise a public health perspective in the education of tomorrow’s doctors, aligned with the new National Health Service (NHS) ‘Long Term Plan’, which has a particular focus on disease prevention and reducing health inequalities (NHS, 2019)
Gillam et al argue that ‘medical students in many countries graduate without feeling energized by their social purpose’

Summary

Introduction

We have a duty of care to all patients, ensuring optimal outcomes through evidence-based prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Our National Health Service (NHS) in the UK turned 70 recently, but is facing threats to its sustainability due to an ageing population and complex problems such as antimicrobial resistance, obesity, air pollution and socioeconomic inequality. One solution may be to emphasise a public health perspective in the education of tomorrow’s doctors, aligned with the new NHS ‘Long Term Plan’, which has a particular focus on disease prevention. Gillam et al argue that ‘medical students in many countries graduate without feeling energized by their social purpose’. This could be due to full curricula and pedagogical issues that encourage the student perception that public health is ‘abstract’ and ‘irrelevant to clinical practice’ (Gillam, Rodrigues and Myles, 2016). We feel that many parallels can be drawn between clinical and public health medicine (Table 1)

Clinical methods

Notes On Contributors