On 19 March 2026, BMA House played host to the annual BMA public health medicine conference, drawing together public health registrars and consultants from across the UK. The theme, ‘Rebuilding public health’, follows on from an association report in 2025 called Rebuilding public health: Restoring the foundations of prevention, giving the opportunity for the profession to resolve a way forward.

Launch of a new public health campaign

A critical part of conference was the proposal for a new national campaign. This campaign will draw attention to the parlous state of the public’s health and our public health system, which in many places has been devalued, defunded and fragmented.

The spectacle of seeing falling healthy life expectancy while new public health consultants struggle to find substantive work is damning. The asks to the governments of the UK are simple:

– Restore public health funding in England back to 2015 levels in real terms per capita and ensure consequential funding for the devolved nations

– End job freezes and increase public health numbers to 30 whole-time equivalent per million population across the UK, ensuring that there is an even mix of professional backgrounds and interests and an end to specialist substitution

– Seriously prioritise prevention of ill health, including the wider determinants of health.

The campaign will be collective action. We will be calling on public health registrars and consultants, other health professionals and the public more widely to engage their MPs and councillors on this issue, to sign and share petitions, and push this higher up the agenda.

Naturally, we will be working with partners, such as doctors in Unite, who represent other groups of public health registrars and consultants. Emma Runswick, a keynote speaker and deputy chair of the BMA, hammered home the importance of local structures and organising for such campaigns.

An open debate for the profession

For the first time, the conference also hosted an open debate about the profession, a novel format for us that saw participants talk among themselves before opening out to the floor.

Focusing on some of the tension points of recent years, we had clear endorsement from conference that:

– The current postgraduate training model and statutory regulation in the UK is a world-class asset and while it can always be improved, the fundamentals remain vital

– Public health consultants are unique senior leaders and specialists who bring an outstanding level of quality assured expertise and impact to population and public health challenges, there is no substitute for the specialist register

– The diversity of professional backgrounds in public health is also a key asset and this includes the unique insights that the medical qualification route brings alongside the different insights brought by other routes into the profession

– Our aspiration should be for all public health registrars and consultants to enjoy NHS contracts and pension scheme access, with recognition of previous service

– Our profession is inherently political, if non-partisan, and our independent voice is vital: we should be bringing our own personal values and advocacy where it’s to the benefit of the public.

We also heard some hard truths about concerns that our profession has become more isolated, has lost healthcare presence, has sometimes lost focus on impact, and can fail to reflect.

Doing things differently

As well as trying to mix up the conference format, we also saw a strong message from our keynote speaker, Jo Bibby, and our workshop leads that public health needs to work differently to what it may have done in the past. 

Dr Bibby spoke powerfully about the state of population health in the UK and the issues with government rhetoric and short-termism. As we heard in this and last year’s conference, key to our success is making the economic case for public health, securing public trust, harnessing public support and getting smarter with how we present our cases to policymakers.

Our workshops also generated powerful messages on getting public health professionals into advocacy spaces, discussing and responding to global conflicts, the case for development aid, how much further we have to go on equality and diversity in the public health workforce, and the need for action on the growing bottlenecks both before and after training. 

Looking ahead

Having made several positive changes to the annual conference and our annual lecture this year, we recognise there is further to go still to make the conference genuinely inclusive and as impactful as possible.

Your feedback will be invaluable in shaping that and whilst I hope those that attended enjoyed the conference, not everything went to plan and there is always scope for improvement. The first action of the new agenda committee will be to review, reflect and learn from the feedback you gave us on this year’s event.  If you have any further comments and suggestions please e-mail us on [email protected]

As a minimum, your agenda committee is committed to improving first time attendee experience. This could include working with other trade unions more closely on the event, separating out member only motions for the public health medicine committee from motions that all attendees could vote on, consolidating time spent on motion debate further, expanding formats like panels, improving the fringe events and making them more action-oriented, and increasing time spent on trade union activities.

Your elected agenda committee is also committed to the new Sir Sandy Macara lecture, which will continue to see us get out about to different nations and regions in the UK, working with regional and national councils and local branches of practice to deliver an event that shows off our own branch and brings public health to wider audiences. 

All of this will only help our crucial new campaign going forwards.

In solidarity,

Deiniol Jones

Outgoing public health medicine conference chair