Health Protection is an essential part of achieving and maintaining good public health. It seeks to prevent or reduce harm caused by infections and communicable and non-communicable diseases, and minimise the health impact from environmental hazards.
Health protection involves:
- ensuring the safety and quality of food, water, air, products and the general environment
- ensuring uptake of immunisation and cancer and non-cancer screening programmes
- having resilience and plans to deal with health protection emergencies such as outbreaks and incidents that threaten the health of the public.
Health Protection Forum
The larger health economy wide health protection team meet at the quarterly Health Protection Forum, chaired by the Director of Public Health.
The forum includes representatives from the partners shown in the governance hierarchy diagram.
All of these agencies have a legal duty to respond to health protection emergencies. These legal responsibilities are described the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Healthcare professionals
If you are a healthcare professional and would like more information from the Health Protection and Infection Team then please visit the health protection webpage.
The Healthy Walsall website includes guidelines to assist in the management of infections in a variety of health and social care settings, guidance on outbreak management as well as links to general information about infections
Stay well this winter
If you would like more inforamtion on how you can stay well this winter in Walsall, visit the Healthy Walsall website.