52 weeks in public health research – the (very) rough guide

Guest post by Avril Rhodes

Remember the natty idea to take photographs representing a year of working in public health research? Well, how about a quick analysis of what we saw, snapped and submitted? Here are the exciting and indeed revealing results.

After looking at 198, or was it 200, images a portrait of researchers concerns emerges – not exactly Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so much as the Rhodes' hierarchy of academic obsessions.

Bottom or is it top of the pile comes food. It’s official – no less than 42 pictures, close up and distance shots, ranging from individual snacks, drinks and meals to full size conference spreads and displays. I felt slightly queasy after looking at them all. Feed those academics!

The next most important thing is to feed the mind. Any passing course, lecture, symposium and the like weighing in with 20 pictures. But there’s lots more that get close to the mind-feeding category although making more cameo-esque appearances, such as degree ceremonies, IT, stands and posters, books, theses, work in progress and journal covers. Publication definitely counts. Completing work even more.

The office – no not the TV series, comes next, with 16 images, inflated perhaps with opportunities created by moving office and the delights of standing desks and desks tied to exercise apparatus. I would not have dreamed that taking a picture of the immediate work environment was so important. 

Travel ranks highly but possible to count in different ways. Railway stations are significant at 11 pictures, especially Newcastle Central – of world significance as stations go, but that’s just me. Car travel featured just slightly with a nod to cycling. Active travel (good and bad) is clearly a source both of delight, when stairs get favoured, and frustration, when lifts are promoted. Exercise equipment got a decent look in too. 

Signs and marketing really played on the collective academic mind. Labelling, the impact of shop placements and advertising, spelling mistakes, unintended humour, public health messaging, came in with around 12 images. Some of this felt a bit judgemental, when it came to cheap unhealthy food signs. Not too many wider determinants of health, it has to be said.

 

Field work related images scored a fairly respectable 9.

 

Culture kept creeping in. Museum visits, architecture, music, sculpture were all there. Nature played a relatively small part, but researchers did appreciate the cute, the beautiful, office plants and the changing seasons.

 

Then a whole rag bag of one-offs. Some were clearly novelty items or personal reminiscences, and some seemed like stream of consciousness, or pet concerns.

Curiously, the academic world was quite short of pictures of people, except in crowd shots doing serious lecture type stuff. It looked a camera shy world. So what do we have? A hard working, semi-office bound, nomadic community that likes writing, learning, unable to switch off form public health even when undertaking a leisure activity or just walking around the town, that enjoys high art and longs to sniff a flower. Is this what we are? The camera apparently doesn’t lie.

Public Health Post-election: What is its future?

Posted by David J Hunter, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Durham University and Fuse Deputy Director

The Conservatives’ election victory has brought both old and new faces into the ministerial team at the Department of Health. Jane Ellison returns as a junior minister and will retain the public health brief thereby bringing a degree of continuity to the post. She was growing into the post in the run-up to the election and public health insiders speak well of her.

Public Health Minister Jane Ellison

The fact there has been extensive coverage of the other ministerial appointments in health excluding hers might say a great deal not only about the place of public health in the government’s health priorities but about the level of importance the media attaches to the subject.

Clearly the funding difficulties plaguing the NHS will be uppermost in Jeremy Hunt’s (back as Secretary of State for Health) in-tray with the integrated health and social care agenda not far behind. But the new government is also committed to implementing the Five Year Forward View (5YFV) produced by the NHS Chief Executive, Simon Stevens, last October. Herein lies the hope for public health and surely the near certainty that it will occupy a high place on the government’s list of priorities.

Public health did not feature prominently in the Conservative Party’s manifesto and no major new initiatives were promised. None of the parties had much to say about public health during the campaign. And yet the new government is going to come under significant pressure to up its game over the next five years with the call for ‘a radical upgrade in prevention and public health’ featuring prominently in the 5YFV.

Not only that, but Simon Stevens rarely misses an opportunity in public to stress the importance of public health, admonishing successive governments for their failure to implement the Wanless ‘fully engaged scenario’.  Since the NHS failed to heed the warning, it ‘is on the hook for the consequences’. Wanless wanted a transformed NHS that put health and not illness first.

The 5YFV urges the NHS to redeem itself over the wasted years by becoming an advocate for ‘hard hitting action’ on avoidable lifestyle-related illnesses. Because these put added pressure on health care services, tackling them at source has to be a high priority if a universal service free to all at the point of use is to be sustained.

The latest projections from WHO published a week ago show that Europe faces an obesity crisis by 2030 and that urgent action is needed by governments. In the UK, 33% of women are forecast to be obese by 2030 compared with 26% in 2010. For men, the figures are 36% and 26% respectively. The figures are worse in some other WHO member states with only The Netherlands doing better and remaining stable.

As we know, although there is no silver bullet for tackling obesity restricting unhealthy food marketing is regarded as a key policy lever available to governments. Where this leaves the government’s responsibility deal approach to addressing key public health challenges is uncertain. Even if its critics are persuaded that it is working, the key question in the light of the WHO projections is whether it is working fast enough given the urgency of the crisis looming in under 15 years’ time.

Another key development concerns devolution within England and the Northern Powerhouse initiative. Local MP for Stockton South, James Wharton, has been made the first minister for the project. It builds on the DevoManc announcement earlier this year which put local government in charge of the NHS budget for the Greater Manchester region. Chancellor George Osborne, the architect of this experiment, in his first speech since the election will announce today similar devolved arrangements for the City regions, including Newcastle.

The move to devolve power and responsibility could have major implications for public health as local government will be able to pool budgets and adopt place-shaping policies to improve health and wellbeing and tackle the social determinants of health.

But the catch must be that these developments are occurring at a time when local government is on its knees. With no let up to austerity in sight and with further public spending cuts to come which will fall heavily on local government, the question has to be asked: is local government being set up to fail? Whatever the outcome, there will be significant implications for public health which cannot be predicted. Watch this space.

How active are pregnant women? Measuring the methods

Posted by Louise Hayes and Cath McParlin 

Louise and Cath are presenting on the subject of physical activity in pregnancy at the Fuse Phyical Activity Workshop tomorrow (15 May) at Sunderland University.

So we all know we should move a bit more to be more healthy and reduce our risk of getting diseases like diabetes. For a long time pregnancy was seen as a time when a woman could put her feet up, take it easy and ‘eat for two’. But not any longer! Guidance published over the last few years recommends no ‘pregnant pause’, but rather that pregnant women should aim to achieve at least 30 minutes of activity of at least moderate intensity activity on most days of the week - just like the rest of us.

Part of the justification for this is that physical activity might help to reduce the risk of gestational diabetes (GDM) – that’s a type of diabetes that is diagnosed in pregnancy and (usually) resolves after the pregnancy. However, to some extent, the jury’s still out on whether or not being active when you’re pregnant really does reduce GDM.

Partly this is because we don’t really know how to measure physical activity accurately in pregnant women. The more precisely we can measure physical activity, the more accurately we can establish the relationship between it and GDM and other health outcomes.

Physical activity measurement is fraught with difficulty in any circumstances – it’s a challenge to measure such a complex and multi-faceted behaviour. Pregnancy brings additional challenges. With the development (and increasing affordability) of numerous objective methods for measuring physical activity – pedometers, heart rate monitors, accelerometers - objective measurement of physical activity in epidemiology is increasingly common. For pregnant women, however, the validity and acceptability of these methods remains unclear.

We have agonised over how best to measure physical activity in a pregnant population. What effect does the increasing size of the ‘bump’ have on the validity of waist-worn monitors? How good are monitors at recording low-level activity, common in pregnant women? What are appropriate cut-offs for different activity intensities in pregnant women?

The choice of measurement method has a huge influence on conclusions we draw about how active women are during pregnancy. We have compared questionnaire methods and accelerometry using different criteria to define activity intensity and found that, depending on the method used, we identify anything from 12% to 65% of pregnant women to be meeting the current guideline (30 minutes of at least moderate activity per day) in the first half of pregnancy.

We’re looking forward to discussing the whys and wherefores of different methods of assessing physical activity with the experts attending the Fuse PA Group Workshop at Sunderland University tomorrow (Friday 15 May).

Party manifestoes, part 2: A war on junk food?

Guest post by Avril Rhodes

The Fuse blog has seen pieces on the marketing of junk food near supermarket checkouts in recent weeks. Interestingly, whilst all the political Parties profess many policies related to children and young people, this is a specific topic where they are silent. Perhaps it’s too micro an issue or maybe involves dealing with too many big business interests. Who knows? However, I wouldn’t wish to be called cynical and neither would our potential political masters, who are working hard on the junk food agenda…to varying degrees.

Conservatives will:

• Act to reduce childhood obesity (how?) 
• Continue to promote clear food information (not all that clear an aim, on reflection) 
• Introduce a national evidence based diabetes prevention programme (sounds interesting) 
• Invest more in primary care to prevent health problems (needs more detail)

Labour will:

• Set a new national ambition to improve the uptake of physical activity (and this means…?) 
• Set maximum permitted levels of sugar, salt and fat in foods marketed substantially to children (assuming we know what these foods are, and can get over the qualifier “substantially” without disappearing in a legislative quagmire, this, could, in the end improve the offer at the proverbial check out)

Liberal Democrats will:

• Restrict marketing of junk food to children, including restricting advertising before 9.00pm, and maintain the ‘5 A DAY’ policy (more specific, but perhaps would have the unintended consequence of driving the advertising onto the internet, and what about the argument that the 9.00pm watershed is an anachronism in light of current TV viewing technology?)
• Encourage traffic light labelling of food and publication of information on calorie, fat, sugar and salt content in restaurants and takeaways (and would this be better than dealing with the check-out offer? Or are people going out already committed to a more unhealthy option in the interests of convenience?)

Greens will:

• Extend VAT at the standard rate to less healthy foods, including sugar, and spend the money raised on subsidising a third of the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables. This, it is stated, could prevent 5,000 premature deaths a year. (A bold one this. Could the money raised be tracked to ensure this happened? What about ensuring the quality of the subsidised produce? Who provided the calculations on lives saved?)

Before you despair and think that there are more questions than answers, there is some good news here. All the parties (well except perhaps UKIP, who don’t discuss junk food, though are loud on backing British farming and fishing) have got the message that action needs to be taken about what our food contains. This should encourage the world of public health research. 

All views expressed are exclusively those of the author.

Party manifestoes, part 1: Four lessons to untangle the public health policies

Guest post by Avril Rhodes

Hung over by the election talk? Worn down by the TV debates? Well how about reading the manifestoes? Be honest with yourself, when did you last read a manifesto? The Liberal Democrats’ manifesto is 158 pages, but the remaining largest national parties (Conservative, Labour, Green and UKIP) make do with around 70 to 80ish pages. And the public health policies are all over the place, under welfare, housing, transport, the environment, education, the economy and, occasionally, under health – so need some real work to find. However, that’s good, even if the party seems untroubled by, or hasn’t heard of, the wider determinants of health, at least they’re there…or somewhere. So, first lesson, be prepared to find a public health policy just about anywhere. 

Second lesson, be ready to make comparisons and choose your topic. Take the broad sweep and you will find the whole thing indigestible, and it may turn you into a floating voter after you’ve agreed and disagreed in about equal measure with all you’ve read.

So, here’s one of the easier examples: booze and fags.

• Conservatives will end open display of tobacco in shops, introduce plain packaging and support people “struggling with addictions”. The latter is swept up in a review in how best to treat long term yet treatable conditions, which include alcohol addictions. 
• Labour come in with a levy on tobacco firms to pay for NHS staff and they will target high strength, low cost alcohol products, their argument being that this fuels problem drinking. 
• The Liberal Democrats want to reduce smoking rates, complete the introduction of plain packaging and also make a tax levy on tobacco companies, in their case to contribute to the costs of health care and smoking cessation services. They will also monitor evidence on e-cigarettes and “ensure restrictions on marketing and use are proportionate and evidence based”. Finally they will introduce a minimum unit price (MUP) for alcohol. 
• The Greens will increase alcohol and tobacco taxes to help fund NHS spending increases and set a MUP of 50p. In a big section on road safety they will reduce the alcohol limit for drivers “to as close to zero as possible”. 
• UKIP under their “Save the Pub” campaign will provide tax breaks for micro-breweries, amend the smoking ban to give pubs the chance to open smoking rooms, “properly ventilated and separated”, oppose minimum unit pricing and reverse the plain packaging rules. All of this, which you will have guessed, is in a chapter on “Heritage and Tourism”.

Third lesson, consider what’s not been said. Reading between the lines I think it’s probable, for example that Labour and the Greens would favour plain packaging, the Liberal Democrats might consider 50p for their MUP, and Labour might be amenable to, say, reducing the blood alcohol limits. But we can’t be sure.

Fourth lesson, if you’re going to have a debate with your friends about what’s on offer, anticipate the arguments they might offer, like, for example, that good local pubs, will combat loneliness, provide employment, and maintain community cohesion. Does that end justify the means? Or is UKIP’s claim that 6,000 pubs closed due to the smoking ban and ending the alcohol duty escalator worth bringing in the smokers from the cold?

All views expressed are exclusively those of the author.