An opportunity to seize or a threat to mitigate? UK public health specialists’ views on artificial intelligence (AI)
In December 2025, the AI and Digital Public Health SIG published a report exploring the UK public health workforce's capabilities, hopes, concerns, and willingness to engage with AI professionally.
VIEW REPORT: An opportunity to seize or a threat to mitigate? UK public health specialists’ views on artificial intelligence (AI)
This report presents findings from a cross-sectional survey of 188 public-health professionals registered with the Faculty of Public Health.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly integrating into health-influencing systems, including education, justice, welfare, and healthcare. The public health impact is twofold: a professional tool promising to augment specialists’ capabilities, yet pervasively threatening health equity as the digital determinant with the potential to impact almost all drivers of population health. This report is the first exploring the UK public health workforce's capabilities, hopes, concerns, and willingness to engage with AI professionally. It sets out strategic recommendations, developed by the AI and Digital Public Health SIG membership, for the Faculty of Public Health, Public Health Organisations, and FPH members to support public health practitioners to implement equitable, responsible, trustworthy, and ethical AI.
We find a profound AI-capability gap and reveal a profession at a critical juncture:
cautiously optimistic about AI's potential, but acutely aware of its pitfalls - and their own readiness to engage. Most public health specialists surveyed are not opposed to AI, but they are unsure and unprepared. They are caught between a desire to harness AI for efficiency and innovation, and a deep-seated, well-founded concern about its risks to accuracy, equity, and public trust.
A central ethical dilemma splits the profession.
For some, "generative AI has no use cases which are of value to society, let alone public health". The ethical minefield of harms from biased data, flawed outputs, and exacerbated inequities are unacceptable risks that should preclude its use in public health. Others feel “the moral scale has tipped…given the productivity gain, I feel a moral imperative to use AI” to achieve the greatest possible improvements in health and equity for the greatest number of people. For them, the unacceptable risk would be not using AI and losing potential life gained. The juxtaposition of high hopes for efficiency with deep fears of inaccuracy creates a fundamental tension between the moral imperative to be efficient and the ethical duty to do no harm - navigating this is a challenge public health specialists must face together.
The public health workforce's ability to capitalise on AI-applications while mitigating AI-harms represents a critical safeguard for the public that must be developed with urgency.
Practitioners are poised to engage with AI but are held back by a critical and self-aware gap in capability, confidence, and governance. We outline recommendations are designed to bridge this gap, creating a pathway from the current state of cautious, informal experimentation to a future of confident, systematic, and ethical use of AI to improve and protect the public’s health. Fostering confident, accountable leaders in AI will require urgent and coordinated investment in building workforce capability alongside the development of robust professional and organisational governance. Without this, the public health profession risks being left behind, merely reacting to a technology that it has the potential, and the duty, to shape for the public good.
The challenge is not invention but translation: public health has the tools to move from being a cautious observer to a confident leader in the ethical application of AI.
The public health profession brings at least three critical contributions to the responsible use of AI. First, it brings methodological rigour, where existing skills in critical appraisal and epidemiology provide powerful frameworks for evaluating AI tools, discerning value from hype, and foreseeing unintended consequences. Second, it offers systems leadership, using its expertise in cross-sector collaboration and public engagement to navigate complex implementations and build societal trust. Finally, and most importantly, public health provides an ethical compass. It must leverage its unique skills in advocacy and consensus-building to influence policy, leading the charge to ensure AI reduces, rather than exacerbates, health inequalities.
Public health must transition from cautious observer to confident leader, championing a pivot from individual-focussed deployment to the systems-level AI required to mitigate the profound social, equity, and health risks identified. The path forward, then, is not about learning a new discipline from scratch, but about public health recognising and applying its own undervalued strengths to this new context. Doing so is imperative if we wish to ensure these powerful new tools are harnessed for the fundamental goal of a healthier, more equitable society.
View the full report here.
