What are the career options in public health and preventative medicine (community medicine) without media appearances?

[potato101]

I'm interested in public health and preventative medicine (community medicine) but I can't see myself appearing on the news.

 

All the other responsibilities I am okay with - working with all the stakeholders (patients, physicians, healthcare admin), interpreting data, designing programs, reviewing cases.

 

Public speaking (e.g. to a conference), meeting with politicians is okay, but I'm not comfortable being the public spokesperson. 

 

Is seems like most people from this specialty end up as Medical Officers of Health (MOH), which would require media appearances?

 

What are some alternatives where I can work behind the scenes?

[GH0ST]

HI! 

I hope you're still around! 

So the Public Health Physicians of Canada website has a great presentation as a primer on PHPM related education and career opportunities but I'll try to summarize

1. local public health - medical officers of health, associate medical officers of health, medical directors (typically within a local organization like a public health unit or health organization)
2. provincial public health - public health physicians (typically in a provincial organization such as Public Health Ontario or Alberta Health or BCCDC), associate chief medical officers of health with the provincial ministry, chief medical officer of health 
3. federal public health - public health physicians (typically federal organizations include CIHI, Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, etc) 
4. academic public health - research, education, typically either in a department of public health and preventive medicine or at a school of public health 
5. medical consultants - depending on which organizations need help with various aspects of PHPM (ex. help develop a vaccine program and policy for the workforce, ex. help with a smoking prevention campaign, ex. help with a population health assessment and program evaluation for an organization, supporting a medical school to develop a public health curriculum, etc) 

Pillars of PHPM include

• injury prevention
• health promotion
• health protection
• health policy and management 
• environmental health 
• biostatistics/epidemiology (population health assessments as well) 

And within each of these pillars there are many other areas involving health communication, media relations, governance strategies, leadership and management, human resource planning, public health ethics, public health law, program development + evaluation etc...

In the context of media relations... you will need to have experience engaging with the media regardless of your role, but the amount of engagement will depend on your role... if you're an A/MOH... you're going to do media briefings, radio interviews, print interviews... you're going to have to respond to public inquiries including, but not limited to ex. hockey moms asking why you hate their children for imposing a mask mandate, employers asking for additional guidance on what to do, general public asking you to do more, etc. If you're a PHPM physician, you may not necessarily do much media interactions face to face but will still get some questions that you need to address from media and community members. 

Now can you find a job where you have little interaction with the media? Yeah... if you're an academic, or consultant, and moving away from issues particularly associated with the pandemic then perhaps you could. Will you be able to avoid it forever throughout your career... absolutely not. Media training, including how to navigate difficult questions, and communicating volumes of health information to a large group of people. 

I can help further if you have other questions

- G 

[potato101]

I see, thanks for the answer. So would you advise that this specialty is not ideal for people not keen on media appearances?

 

What would be the best roles internal to a hospital such as managing long term patient outcomes, public health initiatives, technology adoption, etc?

 

Would it make more sense to go IM/EM and then find a way into the administrative side of hospitals instead? My only concern with this route is it seems like the protected times can be quite limited (e.g. only 0.25 FTE) as opposed to full time positions in public health and preventative medicine.

 

Also could you clarify what you mean by consultant? Would those essentially be temporary contract roles?

[GH0ST]

I think you need to ask yourself first if you want to be a full fledged PHPM physician or a clinician that practices public health... those are two different things. You seem to be more interested in discussing more opportunities in clinical medicine. In PHPM, there is a clinical medicine but that is on the background relative to seeing patients. That said, many PHPM physicians have side clinical practices. 

And that's a hard question... some are short term consultants, some are longer... hard to explain the nuances here. 

- G