International Festival of Public Health

Workshops

Culture and Health Workshop

Presenting: Clare Huish

Time: Parallel Session 1

Workshop description:

This interactive workshop will discuss the impact of culture on health using the Cultural Iceberg Model as a starting point whilst sharing a round of Argentinean mate (mat-tay) tea and biscuits.

Clare Huish is a Lecturer in Public Health and leads on the MPH ‘Intercultural Public Health’ course unit here at The University of Manchester.

Current issues in antibiotic drug resistance – what everyone needs to know.

Presenting:

Time: Parallel Sessions 1 & 2

Workshop description:

Antibiotic (antimicrobial) drug resistance is on a par with climate change in terms of its threat to human, animal and ecological destruction. In Europe alone, one of the biggest tragic examples of human iatrogenesis, results in 700,000 infections with bacteria resistant to antibiotics, the majority acquired in hospitals, and attributable to 35,000 deaths and almost 900,000 DALYS. The impact is greatest in the youngest and oldest members of society and remains highest in Italy and Greece. Global costs will continue to escalate to the trillions of pounds. Is it too late to act? – not doing more by all of us just isn’t a sensible answer.

Human intervention is responsible from many different perspectives, including social and economic, from bench to bedside and across all academic disciplines. This workshop will provide six presentations from a spread of experts talking about health care ethics, national inequalities, clinical pharmacy, public policy and the important patient/public perspective. No matter who you are and where you are – everyone has an influence, just like climate change, to ensure antibiotics work when we need them to, and that only people who need them actually get them, wherever they are in the world.

Working With Virtual Communities - How Well is Public Health Responding to Digital Determinants of Health?

Presenting: Andrew Rogers

Time: Parallel Session 2

Workshop description:

If Dahlgren and Whitehead sat down today to design the Determinants of Health Model it is likely that it would come out very differently. In 1991 when it was first published our use of computers, mobile phones, social media, wearable tech etc. was very different from today.

How have these shifts impacted upon health and wellbeing? Which threats have they created? Which have been amplified? What assets for wellbeing have been created? and is the sum total of these changes a challenge or facilitator of public health?

More pertinent for this Festival is the question of whether Public Health is keeping up? After all in significant areas of physical and mental health those who profit from illness seem to have a firmer grasp on technologies and media than those concerned with promoting wellbeing. Take for example sex education where pornography has virtually now taken over from health and education providers in shaping young people expectations of sex and relationships.

This is only the tip of the iceberg - some of the social media campaigns around sugar and obesity are well developed and the #AdEnough campaign includes specific challenge to the use of web 2.0 in targeting children’s sugar consumption. But is it enough? Does public health work on the same parameters that its opponents do? Is it working?

This workshop will peer into the complexities of these issues and more (anorexia, identity, deep fakes and the dark web will also be explored) and it will end with a reflection on whether public health teaching is dealing with these challenges, proposing that a new curriculum is required for working with virtual communities and proposing that most of the core models underpinning health promotion and community development now need to be updated at the very least and some of the more popular ones need to be re-engineered.

Innovations in public health: Rochdale and the Red Cross

Presenting: Karan Thomas, Emily Oliver

Time: Parallel Session 2

Workshop description:

The increasing struggle that urgent care services face demands new ideas and approaches. First aid education has hidden in a green box for too long. Yet it is a fundamental and critical route to faster care for those that need it. It is also empowering and healing on many levels. Drawing on a recent study providing first aid education to drug and alcohol users in Rochdale, we present why it should come out of the box and become a prominent public health tool, evidenced to increase resilience and reduce the burden on urgent care services.