Population & Public Health

Population health asks a different question from clinical care: not "how do I treat this patient?" but "why is this community sicker than that one, and what would change it?" Answering it means working with health data at national scale - millions of records, linked across primary care, hospitals and beyond - and knowing how to turn what you find into decisions.

This pathway is a curated set of six sessions from HDR UK and its partners. It opens with the defining public-health challenge of the decade - multiple long-term conditions - in three short explainers: what they are, which datasets answer questions about them, and how the research community does the work well. It then moves from measurement to action: healthcare data driving service change against inequality, a worked example of linked national data answering an urgent equity question during the pandemic, and how the pandemic reshaped the secure data environments public-health analysts now work in.

Careers run from public-health analyst into senior and consultant roles, into epidemiology, and into population-health leadership at integrated care system or national level - in NHS England, ICSs, the UK Health Security Agency, government programmes, public-health charities and university departments. Demand from public-sector and charity employers is high.