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This chapter widens the history from consideration of specialists to outline key changes from 2005 for public health practitioners from all backgrounds, as well as the attention given to others in the workforce who could benefit the public's health and ways, such as via specific networks, their development needs could be met. As part of this response to continuing public health challenges as outlined in the 2005 Choosing Health White Paper, the mid-2000s saw the development of national agreement on the core competencies for anyone working in public health as well as those skills needed for specific areas of practice, leading to development of a competency framework applicable to the whole public health workforce. The UKPHR from 2008 opened for registration of public health practitioners in addition to specialists.

While health has long been central to the sustainable development agenda, academics and scholars are only just beginning to analyse the relevance of international health law to sustainable development law. This work requires a great deal of future development, and this chapter simply presents a starting point, the identification of a future legal research agenda. Such an agenda seeks to encourage public health practitioners and international legal specialists to consider health law from a genuinely global perspective. This chapter argues that the future legal research agenda in health law and sustainable development will focus on intersections between health regimes and others. To provide a flavour of recent debates, the chapter surveys recent trends in international health law, examining certain selected areas of law in more detail.

This chapter presents qualitative research findings of the views of frontline practitioners and service users of public health partnerships in four selected tracer issues. The topics examined include: the benefits and barriers to partnership working, the effectiveness of partnerships in providing a more seamless service for users, and what is needed to improve services for users through the aegis of partnership working.

This chapter examines the ways in which illness is made knowable in the course of clinical and social transactions by focusing on one of the neighborhoods in East Delhi, Bhagwanpur Kheda. More specifically, it considers the way people interact with health practitioners and understand their illnesses, along with the frequency of their visits to the practitioners. Drawing on a survey of sample households in Delhi over a two-year period (2001–2003) carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Socio-Economic Research in Development and Democracy (ISERDD), the chapter shows that there are no firm epistemic understandings of why illness happens; people often put together a narrative of illness that borrows vocabularies from different medical systems (Ayurvedic, allopathic) as well as vocabularies of the occult. It suggests that there are no well-made ontologies that could account for the movement between disease as it inhabits the human body versus when it exists as an abstraction in textbooks or other discursive forms.

Human beings in the twenty-first century are facing major pressure to manage a rapidly expanding repertoire of health risks and are experiencing various major transitions. To protect health effectively, practitioners and workers in health protection, regardless of being health- or non-health-based, must learn about terminology, acquire knowledge and skills, and understand the frontiers of other disciplines that may facilitate their efforts in improving health. Due to the dynamic changes that influence modern living, the scope and nature of health protection will only become more complex. Mutual learning and collaboration among disciplines and sectors will be essential to enable formulation of effective cross-disciplinary policies and actions to protect health and well-being. Beside the major health protection themes of emergency and disaster preparedness, climate changes, infectious disease control, environmental risks, and issues of sustainability and planetary health, dynamics and transitions that may contribute to major changes in health profile and risks deserve careful monitoring and public health policy reconsideration.

This book explores the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty, drawing on the concepts of affliction and suffering. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it demonstrates the differential distribution of life chances and the surge of aspirations on the part of the poor for improvement in their material and social conditions. It considers the way in which people understand their illnesses and interact with health practitioners, along with the frequency of visits to the practitioners. It also examines the implications of medical technologies for kinship obligations; how practitioners with different kinds of training, including apprenticeship, see their own practices of healing; and how theories embedded in the everyday experiences of patients and healers might be made to speak critically to the expert discourses of global health.

This chapter describes the sanitary conditions of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, the diversity of ideas about illnesses, spaces for healing and diseasing, and the multitude of practitioners who operated in this context. It introduces a Caribbean geography of health and disease, the contours of which appear familiar, but upon closer scrutiny morph into unsettling spaces. Rather than being mere reproductions of Old World hierarchies and dynamics, the chapter shows, Caribbean landscapes of healing were created anew through the multiple encounters that occurred between mostly black historical actors in the highly competitive cultural economy based on the experiential that developed in the region. These were arenas in which a variety of actors deployed multiple visions of the natural, cultural, and social world of the early modern Atlantic. The multiplicity of origins of practitioners of African descent implies that analysis of their historical circumstances cannot be contained in simple dialectic terms of continuities, ruptures, or coarsely defined hybridities. By unmasking muddying labels and maps of social and physical landscapes conceived through Old World imaginaries, we begin to perceive the countless ways in which black Atlantic actors usurped canonical and mundane spaces in which to enact their own corporeal encounters.

This chapter examines the types of injuries that the participating women sustained as a result of domestic violence and contextualises this data with information from other research. Making a distinction between physical and non-physical injuries proved important in relation to the response of health practitioners as well as the women from stage one. Just as definitions of violence and abuse can be problematic, so too do women who experience domestic violence feel these contradictions. This is compounded by abuse, which has a non-physical health impact and results in injuries that cannot be seen either by the participating women or ‘others’.