SUCCESSFUL PUBLIC HEALTH CAMPAIGNS INVOLVING ALLIED HEALTH WORKERS

Abstract

Allied health workers have a key role in the success of public health campaigns to improve lifestyle challenges and health behaviour but also face a range of barriers (McLean et al., 2018). Public health campaigns aim to improve factors that affect people’s health, such as smoking, diet, and physical activity levels, and may also encourage the uptake of screening, immunisations, or use of public health interventions. Public health strategies are vital as the health and social care systems in the UK are increasingly burdened with long-term conditions and chronic obesity. Effective lifestyle interventions and behaviour change programmes that improve health or prevent ill health in the long term are therefore vital to the sustainability of health and social care in the UK. Allied health professionals (AHPs) play an important role in the public health agenda as they have a wide reach in the community, particularly with disadvantaged or vulnerable groups (K. Gale & S. Sidhu, 2019).

Case-studies illustrate the ways in which allied health professionals have worked closely with their local health communities to provide appropriate public health messages for specific target groups. The case-studies identify particular factors that foster successful public health campaigns and highlight numerous challenges that allied health staff continue to face. Successful strategies include engagement with the local community and service-users, working alongside public health teams within integrated care systems, involving the target group in the co-design of resources, ensuring timely and trustful communication, and 62 use of innovative technology. Effective campaigns are sensitive to culture, language, and faith and embed sustainable and achievable lifestyle messages. Where campaigns are actively supported by government and local policy, there is a better chance of sustained success. Allied health professionals also face a range of barriers such as insufficient resources, restrictive periods of funding, and lack of wider awareness within the general population of their role in promoting public health.