Dr. Sara Burke:

There are upsides but we are starting from decades of underprovision. Public health doctors were not approved as the equivalent of consultants until the pandemic. I am not sure how many consultants or specialists are now in the system but we are decades behind international progress in public health. What has happened is good and there is much better public recognition of the importance of public health and of the logic of planning the delivery of our health system, but we need many more public health specialists in the system and they do not have to be just medics. In other countries, there are lots of multidisciplinary public health people.