Mental illness accounts for the highest burden of all disease and the highest proportion of health care spending. Most mental illness begins in childhood and often continues throughout life. People with mental health problems have a significantly reduced life expectancy. No other health condition matches mental illness in the combined extent of prevalence, persistence and breadth of impact. Mental illness is consistently associated with deprivation and has significant social and economic costs. Despite such impacts, ‘mental health is not prominent across public health actions and policy’ (RCPsych, 2010, No health without public mental health: the case for action).

This piece of work will scope the current range of actions to address mental illness within Public Health departments in Cheshire & Merseyside. For example:

• health intelligence;
• surveillance and assessment of mental illness in the population – unmet need;
• ensuring effective and equitable provision of services – commissioning, clinical governance;
• preventing mental illness and reducing mental health inequalities;
• strategy development and partnership working;
• strategic leadership;

The scoping study will seek to explore and identify:

1. The extent to which mental illness is equitably addressed as a public health issue;
2. The factors and enablers affecting the levels and quality of activity;
3. Recommendations for future public health action on mental illness, based on examples of good practice and potential mechanisms for improvement;

CHaMPs: the Cheshire and Merseyside Public Health Network, plus current office location

This is an opportunity to undertake a comprehensive HNA looking at the Colonoscopy Screening Unit element of the bowel cancer screening programme across the two programmes in Cheshire and Merseyside with a view to assessing the need for colonoscopy screening, against the current screening unit provision. The HNA results will be fed to the bowel cancer commissioners group in order to assess whether the current programme requires review.
The HNA questions are:

1. Do we have the correct geographical boundaries?
2. Are SSP (Screening Assessment) clinics situated in the right places, and do we have enough of them?
3. Are colonoscopy centres situated in the right places, and do we have enough of them?
4. What will the effects of the introduction of flexible sigmoidoscopy be, and do we have the extra capacity required?

Some additional information needs are:

• Bowel cancer in the target age group – incidence, mortality, trends, survival/ staging, estimates of lives saved
• Initial screening uptake across the patch: key areas/ population groups where action is required.
• Any qualitative work that may have been done in localities

Dear colleagues

May I draw your attention to the range of National Treasure training opportunities that are available to Specialty Registrars who are progressing normally in training and who are in Phase 3 of training.

Any exploration of these opportunities must be with the support of the Educational Supervisor and Training Programme Director. Taking up an opportunity would be subject to usual Out of Programme application.

(Note there is a Mersey Deanery process for this which must be followed).

The Nuffield Trust, London

Dear colleagues

This is a flyer about a national treasure training opportunity. As always, if you want to apply for it you must have the support for your Educational Supervisor and TPD.

The Field Epidemiology Training Programme is a full time, competency based, two year postgraduate training programme aimed at health professionals with a keen interest in applied health protection epidemiology and who wish to develop their specialist field epidemiology skills: namely scientific, and nursing staff, and Specialty Training Registrars. The emphasis of the programme is on learning by doing activities but at least ten percent of time is dedicated to formally taught training courses. FETP fellows are based and trained in the UK and follow the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) curriculum, however, some modules are held in Europe. The programme is known as EPIET-associated programme (EAP).

There is an immediate opportunity for a Specialist Registrar in Public Health or Primary Care to undertake a research placement with Professor Buchan at the University of Manchester (see: www.nibhi.org.uk).

Outline

The aim of this project is to bring a public health focus on cardiovascular disease prevention into the centre of a European Network of Excellence doing research into future electronic personal and clinical records. The deliverables are: 1) a review of literature and relevant policies in cardiovascular prevention in the context of “missed opportunities for primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention”; and map the landscape of health promotion and healthcare where future information systems can communicate concepts of prevention (such as policies or guidelines) that mean the same in different populations/years/contexts. Informatics experts will use this information to focus their research, and the overall SemanticHealthNet consortium will produce findings intended to influence EU legislation, regulation and other e-Health research. The public health findings are intended to be published ahead of the overall study, in public health and health informatics journals.

Specifications

• Suitable for: Specialist Registrars in Public Health or Primary Care.
• Timing: Flexible length of placement (3-9m), starting Q1 2012.
• Advisors: Iain Buchan (Manchester) & Simon Capewell (Liverpool).
• Nature of research: policy and literature review; preparation of a public health case study for a European Network of Excellence in semantic health information systems
• Focus: cardiovascular disease prevention and early intervention.
• Publication opportunities: wide range of epidemiological; health informatics, health services research and health policy literature linked to top EU and US thinking in the semantic interoperability of health information.
• Essential skills needed:
  • Adept at synthesis of public health evidence from literature.
  • Some direct experience with care pathways and how they relate to primary care and health promotion.
• Desirable skills needed:
  • Experience with cardiovascular epidemiology or policy research.
  • Experience with healthcare information systems.