10 June 2015
Jersey’s Public Health Department will be sharing knowledge with, and learning from, other small jurisdictions at a two-day inter-island public health conference being held in Guernsey this week.
Nine territories will be represented at the event, which is being held on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 June: Sark, Guernsey and Jersey, the Isle of Man, Orkney and the Western Isles, and Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Jersey’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr Susan Turnbull, welcomed the conference, which has the theme ‘Sharing Knowledge and Skills’.
“We’d like to thank our Guernsey colleagues for organising this event and we’re very much looking forward to sharing examples of good public health practice in Jersey with island colleagues from far and wide," she said.
“Public health work is about protecting and promoting the health and wellbeing of everyone in the population and preventing what is preventable, so you could say that all of us at this conference have a common job description. It is, therefore, incredibly useful to share information with each other and to learn from the challenges and opportunities experienced by other small jurisdictions.”
Sharing knowledge on range of topics
Subjects being discussed at the conference include suicide prevention, men’s health, cardiovascular disease risk factors in young people, health profiling and inequalities, port health, tobacco control and sexual health.
Presentations will range across health improvement, health protection, environmental health, health service quality and epidemiology.
Professor John Newton, Chief Knowledge Officer in England and Regional Director of Public Health for the NHS South Central area, will give the keynote speech ‘Using data and information to drive public health: the challenge of small populations’.
gov.je