Careers Advice

Please note: We are not a careers advisory service and so are limited in the advice we can provide.

The following advice is mainly about working in England as the public health systems are slightly different or have different names in Wales and Scotland.

It is difficult to provide general information on public health careers and how they work, as there is no ‘career’ path and many people come to it from a variety of backgrounds and move around in the field.

PHORCaST

PHORCaST, the Public Health Online Resource for Careers, Skills and Training, has recently been launched and promises to be a fantastic resource.
 
 
NHS

If you want to work in the National Health Service (NHS) there are many public health career options, but a great many are based within Primary Care Trusts at various levels; from practitioners working directly with the public, to strategy and policy people. There are also roles for ‘commissioners’; those that budget and plan for how public health will happen. Jobs for the NHS are found on the following websites:

Charity

There is also the option of working for a charity and there are many charities working on health issues. Some have strong areas of work in public health, promotion and prevention. You may like to look at the following websites, as they list these sorts of jobs:

Health Promotion

You might be interested in our health promotion qualification. You might also be interested in seeing if you want qualify with the Faculty of Public Health, as senior public health people in the NHS tend to be accredited by the FPH.