Another great podcast from Jigsaw PSPH. This time, talking to Graham Jukes, the Chief Executive of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, who remains ever positive, energetic and optimistic about the future of the environmental health profession in UK.
The CEO of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health gave up his lunch to talk 2 us find out what he had 2 say http://jigsawpsph.podomatic.com
Readers in the UK, which is, to be honest, nearly both of you, may well have seen the recent stooshie about a cricket club in Norfolk apparently forced to cease practising on a village playing field on health and safety grounds.
The odious rag responsible for this nonsensical interpretation of reality was, of course, the Daily Telegraph. Although promoted as a newspaper of record, it is, in reality, the broadsheet equivalent of “fur coat and nae knickers”, always chasing after the scandalous and prurient, but using longer words than the tabloids. Continue reading
The weekend before last I was up in Edinburgh for the Geograph conference, which is a photography cum maps cum geography project with a website at www.geograph.org.uk. It does score pretty high on the Parka Scale of anorakism, but it keeps me off the streets and in the hills most of the time.
The following pictures are three things that caught my eye:
The sunshine in Leith reflected through a blue glass and a glass of Peroni:
The stern stone bull over what was once a butcher’s shop on St. Mary’s Street in the Old Town:
An oblique shot of windows in the side wall of a building in Holyrood Street:
Helen and I went for a walk at the Tileworks trail on the Moine Mhor nature reserve this afternoon. This single red campion flower stood apart from its fellows, letting me isolate it in the camera. I then manipulated it in post-processing to get this intense, but ghostly, image.
When I was in London last week I paid a very quick visit to the Grant Museum of Zoology in Gower Street. Lots of lovely things, but the Micrarium really caught my eye.
A great new podcast from JigsawPSPH, who were also at the CIEH Annual Meeting. I get quoted anonymously – bet you can’t spot it.
“Otherwise Ok?” the new Jigsaw Podcast http://t.co/D61M25jNsF featured on @ukhealthradio & iTunes link at http://t.co/G0sNikW33e
— JigsawPSPH (@JigsawPSPH) June 15, 2013
Time for a change to the look and feel of the blog, so what better free theme to use than Skeptical by WooThemes? As yet, I’m using the default (free!) theme, although I think I’ll look to customising it a bit in the future. All comments and suggestions welcome. You’ll see I’ve got a bit of a blue thing going.
And photo headers as well, you lucky reader. First image up is Loch Craignish a few miles up the road from me.
I thought I’d start an occasional series listing the books I’ve read, am reading or have in the to-read pile. This won’t include literary criticism or book reviews, because that’s not something I feel comfortable writing, but it’s a piece of fun. And it may tell you more than you really want to know about me. Continue reading
In the CIEH’s Royal Charter, environmental health is described as an art and a science. I suspect that this duality has long undermined the collective will of the profession to do our damnedest to put environmental health practice on a sound scientific basis. After all, if we have no evidence base for a particular way of doing things, we can always claim art, can’t we?
It is true that the stressors that affect public health and drive health inequalities are not all biological like typhoid, or physical like noise, or chemical like lead. Some are social as when people are in overcrowded housing or have no security of tenure. Some are financial such as being unable to afford to heat a home in winter or buy fresh food for a family.
Equally, some of our professional interventions are scientific, such as ensuring that water is clean and that E. coli O157 is absent from the steak pie you’ve just bought for your Sunday lunch.
Other interventions are social, providing money to enable people to insulate their homes and thus afford to heat them.
And yet others are more artful, such as providing training to workers in health and safety or food safety, or carers in first aid for young children.
But the crucial question remains: how do we know what works? Continue reading
This was one of the themes that came out in the course of the Assembly of Representatives’ meeting at the CIEH’s headquarters yesterday. The Assembly brings together representatives from the various regions and special interest groups of the CIEH and acts to connect the formal governance structure of the charity with its membership.
Jon Buttolph (@jonbuttolph) and Tony Lewis (@CIEHEducation) presented the need for a code of ethics, and opposed to the existing code of conduct, for environmental health practitioners. Continue reading
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Patrick Mackie 