Key Area 6: Health protection
This area of practice focuses on the protection of the public's health from communicable and environmental hazards by the application of a range of methods including hazard identification, risk assessment and the promotion and implementation of appropriate interventions to reduce risk and promote health.
Learning experiences
By the end of phase 1 trainees will have a firm knowledge base for communicable disease and environmental hazard control including both general and specific settings. They will also have a working knowledge of the principles of emergency planning. Drawing conclusions from surveillance, the trainee will be able to participate in simple risk assessment and understand the complex nature of risk communication.
By the end of phase 2 trainees would be expected to use data on exposure, potential health effects and outcomes for common hazards to address a real life health protection problem, accessing expertise and other resources as necessary. They would be able to integrate hazard identification, characterisation and assessment into risk assessment for a commonly occurring hazard. The trainee will be exposed to a range of health protection issues and start to demonstrate competence in managing these. They would also be able to meet the educational requirements for commencing supervised on call and have experience of supervised out of hours emergency work.
By the end of phase 3 trainees would be expected to be able to pull together different types of complex data to draw conclusions for disease control, environmental and chemical hazards control as well as health improvement in the health protection context. They will be able to demonstrate and integrate all public health skills in a health protection context including health intelligence, assessment of effectiveness, policy development, leadership and risk communication and have undertaken health improvement and health service quality work. Trainees will recognise and work within the limits of their professional competence in relation to out of hours emergency work.
Note: Many competencies in other key areas are essential for health protection practice and are not repeated in the list of Key Area 6 competencies. These include KAs 1 + 8 for surveillance and KA 4 for communication.
It is important for training breadth to ensure that, during phase 3 of training, some core competencies are developed in a health protection context as the three months during phase two spent in a health protection unit may not be enough time to cover this. (Examples are when health protection is just one element of a holistic approach eg settings like prisons or schools; risk groups like asylum seekers or intravenous drug users; diseases such as asthma or COPD; services like sexual health etc or when health intelligence, health improvement or service improvement skills are applied to problems related to communicable or environmentally related diseases in general service based work).
Some essential health protection experience cannot be guaranteed during the three month attachment (eg outbreak investigation/management) and may instead be covered during phase 3.
Some competencies will be further developed by doing on-call. On call does not start until phase 2, requiring a firm knowledge base. The specific competencies to be assessed for competence to start out of hours on call are detailed separately.
Potential vehicles for the demonstration of this competence area include:
- Workplace based assessment eg on-call scenarios
- Scenario based exercises
- Reports (including Outbreak/incident reports) and peer reviewed publications
- Presentation of material at peer groups, internal peer audit or external meetings or conferences
Potential settings for the demonstration of this competence area:
By the end of training trainees will have dealt with a broad range of communicable disease and environmental incidents and threats to health in both health care and community settings, including participating in the management of a significant outbreak.
Work overseas or work relating to aspects of international public health protection will also provide opportunity to demonstrate competence in this area of practice.
Links to Knowledge and Skills Framework
- C1: Communication
- C2: Personal and People Development
- C4: Service Improvement
- HWB 3: Protection of Health and Wellbeing
- IK2: Information Collection and Analysis
- G5: Services and Project Management
Knowledge Base
Epidemiology (including microbial epidemiology), and biology (including microbiology) of communicable diseases
Health and social behaviour: in relation to risk of infectious and environmental diseases.
Environment:
- environmental determinants of disease and their control;
- risk and hazard;
- legislation in environmental control;
- environmental monitoring;
- factors affecting health and safety at work;
- occupation and health;
- transport policies and health impact assessment for environmental pollution;
- chemical incident management.
Communicable disease:
- definitions, surveillance;
- methods of control;
- the design, evaluation, and management of immunisation programmes;
- outbreak investigation including the use of relevant epidemiological methods;
- causes, distribution, natural history, clinical presentation, methods of diagnosis and control of infections of local and international public health importance;
- organisation of infection control;
- international aspects of hazard control, national and international public health legislation and its application.
Health protection service issues:
- the development, commissioning and evaluation of the services required for protecting health, including
- sexual health,
- TB,
- immunisations,
- infection control,
- antibiotic resistance,
- occupational health,
- travel health
- and screeningand the need for services in particular settings and in high risk groups (eg. prisons, with asylum seekers, in dental health).