Officers
There are eight Honorary Officers. They are the:
- President
- Two Vice Presidents
- Registrar
- Assistant Registrar
- Academic Registrar
- Assistant Academic Registrar
- Treasurer
President - Professor Lindsey M Davies, CBE, FFPH, FRCP
Elected by the membership and appointed President of the Faculty for a term of three years.
Chairs the Board, Executive Committee, International Committee and Fellowship Committee, and represents the Faculty on a number of related bodies.
Professor Davies is the former Department of Health for England’s National Director of Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (pandemic flu ‘czar’) and was also the Interim Regional Director of Public Health for London and Health Adviser to the Greater London Authority.
As one of the most senior doctors in the Department of Health, she had national and regional responsibilities for policy development and implementation. In her capacity as an Executive Director of NHS London she led NHS Public Health in London, ensuring that health protection, health improvement and reducing health inequalities are at the heart of NHS policy and practice.
After qualifying in medicine at Nottingham University, Lindsey worked for several years in community paediatrics before training in Public Health. She subsequently became Director of Public Health for Southern Derbyshire (1985-9) and for Nottingham (1989-93) before moving in 1993 to the Department of Health’s NHS Executive as Head of Public Health. She became Regional Director of Public Health/Regional Medical Director for the Trent region (later the East Midlands region) in 1995 and remained in that post until 2006 when she moved to the Department of Health in London to lead the UK’s preparations for a flu pandemic.
Lindsey has been a trainer, educational supervisor, Faculty Advisor and Part 1 and Part 2 examiner for MFPH and was for several years the Department of Health’s observer on the Faculty Board.
In the early part of her career she was active in medical politics, contributing to the work of the BMA’s Committee for Public Health Medicine and Community Health as its chair (1992-3), lead negotiator (1986-92) and conference chair (1988-92).
She holds a Special Professorship in Public Health Medicine and Epidemiology at Nottingham University.
Faculty contacts for the President:
Chief Executive, Paul Scourfield
PA to the President, Valerie Macdonald
Vice President - Dr Edmund Jessop
Vice President - Dr John Middleton
Elected by the membership for a three- to five-year term.
Deputises for the President in his or her absence. Chairs the Policy, Advocacy and Communications Committee.
John Middleton has been Director for Public Health in Sandwell for 21 years. His principal interests are environmental health and sustainable development, community safety, prevention of violence and human rights. He is a member of Medical Action for Global Survival and has written the Open University Public Health Reader chapter on terrorism and health (with Victor Sidel). Since 1998, his team has sponsored the Sandwell Health Other Economic Summit (SHOES), a meeting which has "thought globally and acted locally" to improve the health and living conditions of people in Sandwell and beyond.
He has worked extensively on getting research into practice in healthy-public policy, having been a founding signatory of the Campbell Collaboration and leader of the West Midlands ‘Crimegrip’ project. He is chair of the West Midlands Teaching Public Health Network and a theme leader on housing and health for the Birmingham Black Country Applied Health Research and Care (CLARHC) programme. He is Honorary Reader in Public Health at Birmingham University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow with the Warwick University Business School.
He lives in Sandwell with his wife and has four daughters. In another life he is a blues harmonica player with Dr Harp’s Medicine Band. Visit www.drharp.co.uk to sample their critically acclaimed album, Doctor Write Me a Prescription for the Blues.
Registrar - Dr Jeremy Hawker
Elected by the Board for a three- to five-year term.
Responsible for the register of members, the Faculty's Standing Orders, elections and the staff and headquarters of the Faculty. Acts as the Company Secretary, chairs the Professional Affairs Committee and is responsible for the Faculty’s statutory role in Consultant appointments.
Jeremy Hawker has worked at local, regional and national levels in health protection and at local level in ‘general;’ public health. He is currently Regional Epidemiologist for the West Midlands at the Health Protection Agency.
Jeremy qualified in medicine from Birmingham University in 1985 and trained in public health in the West Midlands. He then worked as CCDC in Birmingham from 1992-6 (initially also as a Consultant in Public Health) and then was appointed by the Public Health Laboratory Service as Regional Epidemiologist, where he set up the new Regional Epidemiology Unit. At the formation of the Health Protection Agency in 2003, he was appointed Deputy Director of the Local and Regional Services Division, the largest division of the HPA, which was to integrate approximately 100 separate units and laboratories inherited from the NHS, PHLS, Civil Service and others into a comprehensive and coherent national service. After 3 years in this role, he became Head of Public Health Development for the HPA until December 2009.
Jeremy has played a significant role in public health workforce and training developments, particularly in relation to the developing field of health protection. He was a Board member of the UK Public Health Register from 2005-9, where he was involved in the creation of the defined specialist role and the draft practitioner standards, and the Environmental Health Registration Board (2009-10). He also led the development of the first National Occupational Standards for health protection.
Jeremy is an author of the Communicable Disease Control Handbook and has a particular interest in evidence based health protection, including leading a major review of evidence for 56 infections for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. He also has a research interest in inequalities in communicable disease.
Assistant Registrar - Dr Peter Sheridan
Academic Registrar - Dr Premila Webster
Elected by the Board for a three- to five-year term.
Responsible for the FPH membership examinations, specialty training recruitment and liaison and support to training programmes. Has responsibility, with the Assistant Academic Registrars, for maintaining the public health curriculum and assessment systems.
Chairs the Education Committee and is the principle FPH representative on the Education and Training forums of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.
Premila qualified in medicine at the Christian Medical College, Vellore, India and spent a number of years working as a hospital doctor initially in general surgery and later in anaesthetics and intensive care before embarking on a career in public health in 1991. Presently she is Training Programme Director for the Oxford Deanery and Director of Education and Training in the department of Public Health at Oxford University. She is involved in developing undergraduate and postgraduate education in Public Health at Oxford.
Premila has served the Faculty as Director of Training (Register) and Part II examiner and is a current OSPHE examiner. She worked with the WHO European Healthy Cities Project in Copenhagen and is the expert advisor to the WHO on City Health Profiles and Indicators.
Assistant Academic Registrars - Dr Annette Wood
- Dr Brendan Mason
Filling a casual vacancy until the FPH AGM in 2012.
Work with the Academic Registrar in maintaining the public health curriculum and assessment systems and are responsible for overseeing the logistics of FPH examinations. Responsible for overseeing the portfolio assessments, approval of training placements and E&T international liaison. Work with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and relevant stakeholders to develop the foundation programmes in public health.
Faculty office contact for Academic and Assistant Academic Registrars:
Head of Education and Training,
Treasurer - Dr David Williams
Elected by the Board for a three- to five-year term.
Chairs the Risk Management, Audit and Finance Committee and is responsible for the Faculty's finances.
Originally from South Wales, David Williams was brought up in Yorkshire and went to medical school in Sheffield, qualifing in 1980. After training initially in hospital medicine he joined the Trent Public Health Training Scheme in pre-Calman days.
Completing training in 1997 he joined the North Nottinghamshire Health Authority as CCDC & CPHM for mental health and learning disability services. During the time of PCGs he had a geographical patch in the county before moving into the HPA as a 'pure' CCDC.
An Associate Postgraduate Dean for three years, he moved fully into the Trent deanery in 2006 with responsibility for all secondary care & public health post-graduate training locally. For seven years he was also the East Midlands Training Programme Director. During this time he was responsible for a number of changes including revising the local RITA system, updating specialty recruitment & selection, and developing a fully integrated specialist training scheme.
Since 2003 he has been a member of the Faculty education team, initially leading the Visiting process, and now managing the transition to a new system working alongside PMETB visiting. He has been involved with the production of the new curriculum, including development of the assessment framework.
He is committed to public health education and training and is keen to consolidate the numerous recent changes in order to achieve excellence for the specialty.
Faculty office contact for the Treasurer:
Head of Finance,
