North West Public Health Leadership Programme Evaluation

Background

The Government white paper ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Our strategy for public health in England’ sets out the proposal for a new, dedicated, professional public health service, Public Health England, which will be set up as part of the Department of Health. This strategy and the NHS white paper ‘Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS’ place new responsibilities on local authorities and partner organisations in delivering public health in the future.

This new approach of a more localised public health system will allow a tailored approach to tackling health inequalities that occur in local areas, as opposed to the centralised ‘one size fits all’ approach currently in place.

To aid this transition NHS North West and the Health and Wellbeing Alliance have developed a leadership programme for managers from across the NHS and local authority.

The aims of the training are:

• To develop public health knowledge and understanding of the public health role in existing leaders who have not had the public health role previously
• To develop future leaders from a pool of middle and senior managers who are already working in public health

This leadership programme will help ensure that management teams and organisations are prepared for transition to the new system.

Approach

We are conducting an evaluation to assess the impact of the Public Health Leadership programme in the work place. This will include developing evaluation methodology, data collection including questionnaire, and analysis of collated data.

The results will provide an assessment of the content of the Public Health Leadership programme and the value of attending for participants and the organisations they represent. The data will be used to formulate a final report and recommendations to the Health and Well-Being Alliance.