Review

A well-informed textbook

Public Health for the 21st Century
Judy Orme, Jane Powell, Pat Taylor, Tony Harrison and Melanie Gray (eds)
McGraw-Hill Education, 2003. £19.99

It has often been argued that great improvements in the health of populations have been made by engineers rather than by doctors. And it is similar improvements that public health hopes to promote by persuading housing experts, economists, politicians and others to look at the health impact of their decisions and act in a healthier way. This involves multidisciplinary working, the fostering of partnerships and joined-up thinking. To implement such policy demands a new breed of public health professional with a wide range of skills, which is where this books starts.

It is a series of essays by different contributors, all in an eminently readable style. Summaries at the start of each chapter give the lazy reader an opportunity to decide if that chapter is for them or not. And it gives a clear overview of recent government policies and reorganisations.

The book notes the plethora of policies but laments their lack of implementation. It ponders whether the specialists who can structure a strategy are the same people who can implement it. And it worries about public health being seen as everyone’s business but nobody’s responsibility.

I felt disappointed as the book drifted into descriptions of some of the major problems, such as the inequalities facing public health professionals, without thoroughly addressing the problem of implementation. But by the end I felt as if I had read a well-constructed and informed textbook that covered the breadth of public health from globalisation to the hierarchies of evidence.

It is an up-to-date introduction to public health and the problems that beset it. What it fails to do, though, is to suggest fresh answers to questions about the future of public health.