British inequality: It’s time to trust hungry people
Carl Walker and colleagues make the case for food poverty as a public health emergency and call for concerted response from govt to inequalities only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
More…
Pick a number, any number…
In the run-up to the 2019 general election, I wrote a piece about Boris Johnsons’ strategy for dealing with awkward interview questions. This outlined comment from Johnson himself, where he sketched his dead cat strategy. When faced with an impossible...
More…
The stop-start of collaboration in clinical settings
A post about the difficulties of applied interdisciplinary social science and healthcare collaboration in clinical settings Healthcare organisations and healthcare professionals are under a constant imperative to innovate. Social scientists, in the era of impact, are being asked to play...
More…
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…
Face-mask wearing and public health messaging