Five things I’ve done in the last year as a public health doctor that, like most of what we do, flies under the radar....
1) Our surveillance system found disease-causing mosquitoes in an area where they shouldn’t be. We developed a plan to eradicate them, which we did, and followed up with continued surveillance to make sure they were gone. Nobody became unwell.
2) Managed a pertussis (whooping cough) outbreak in a shelter for a vulnerable population with quite a few very young babies living there. After we implemented the outbreak management plan, nobody else became unwell.
3) Our surveillance system detected a spike in infections of a parasite that can be very nasty. It can spread via several routes. We identified the source using old fashioned environmental health procedures and new genotyping methods. We eliminated it. Nobody else became unwell.
4) I was called into a rental dialysis unit where they were struggling with an outbreak of a bad respiratory virus in their very vulnerable immune-compromised cohort. We got on top of it quickly and stopped the spread rapidly.
5) A nursing home was struggling with a winter vomiting outbreak. We have all seen how bad they can get in hospitals. Our team did a LOT of detective work, found the source and stopped the spread. Outbreak was over very quickly. The dementia unit had zero cases, which is a win!
None of this is very glamorous, but it’s the grunt work that keeps our population safe. That’s just 1% of what we do and only focuses on the infectious diseases stuff. Generally, nobody knows we do this stuff every day. Because we are so low key, the public don’t get very.....
...worried that there are less and less public health doctors in Ireland. It just doesn’t capture the imagination the way the work of our hospital colleagues does. That makes it easier for politicians to ignore us, which they do. We do all of this work to keep the public safe...
....and it’s appreciated in most countries. But in Ireland the @HSELive and successive governments tell us we don’t bring as much to the table as hospital consultants. So we don’t get a consultant contract. We’re the only English-speaking country in the world where this happens..
We all know we’ll never have the profile of a cardiologist or an oncologist in the public domain. But be aware that a world where public health doctors and our amazing teams aren’t managing those outbreaks in some of the most vulnerable corners of society will be a really....
...dangerous place to live, especially for the most vulnerable members of our community.
All of the above is specifically non-covid, to try and show that we’re not one-trick ponies. It also describes work that I’ve been involved in in Ireland and Oz. I’ve been intentionally vague with details for the sake of confidentiality.
