What’s missing from the UK COVID response? Clear communication
If we were playing a game of Just A Minute with the political response to the COVID pandemic, the UK government would have been stopped multiple times for hesitation, repetition and deviation. The phrase ‘this is a war’ would be...
More…
Internally displaced peoples and COVID-19
Africa’s largest city, Lagos, home for more than 20 million people is as a quiet as never before. As with many other cities in the world, Nigeria’s economic capital, on the 31th of March entered a two-week lockdown to prevent...
More…
Predictive Genetics For All – Minister Hancock’s big idea
The future of the NHS is in prevention rather than cure. And the mass application of genetics profiling can bring that about say Health Minister Hancock and his new best friend…. There are big changes afoot in terms of the...
More…
Nudging behaviour is ineffective, naïve and unethical
Interventions to ‘nudge’ people into desirable behaviours have become popular with policy-makers internationally. In the UK, the Behavioural Insights Team – established under former premier David Cameron – are prolific nudgers, designing (amongst many others) inputs to reduce meat consumption, protect...
More…
Promoting health without promoting stigma?
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is again under fire for its campaigning on obesity. There was a lot wrong with their most recent posters, which equated obesity with smoking as a cause of cancer. The debates that followed highlighted the vital...
More…
The Colonisation of Pondering and Pottering
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where...
More…
We’ve Been Here Before…..
Last week’s post by Lesley Henderson on the contemporary anti-vaccination movement’s use of social media, Charlie Davison takes a look at the history of the battle between Public Health and the ‘Anti-Vaxxers’, and finds that things haven’t changed much in over...
More…
Chubby Boozers with Ageing Hearts
What will the person in the street make of recent public health scare tactics? As the politics of austerity continues to bite into NHS and other public budgets, Britain’s top health promotion brains have decided that precious future health resources...
More…
Public Health and the (New) Media
On industry, audiences and health messages Public health campaigners are increasingly focussing on models of media engagement due to the considerable and growing amount of evidence that media campaigns can change population health behaviours. New forms of media (that is...
More…
Incentivizing vulnerability: Regulating migration
Around 9,000 young people who arrived as unaccompanied children and claimed asylum have been denied a residence permit in Sweden since 2015. With a peak of new arrivals in 2015, the waiting time for decisions increased dramatically from a matter of...
More…
Big Drinkers to get a Big Nudge
Public Health England is putting all its efforts into alcohol unit pricing – but is it really the right thing to do? Last week, the Parliamentary Health Select Committee was listening to the views of Public Health experts on the...
More…
The stop-start of collaboration in clinical settings