Mark Pritchard
My first public health exerience came before medical school, when I worked in a cancer registry analysing breast cancer recurrence data. After that, my career included studying graduate-entry medicine at the University of Birmingham, an academic foundation programme in Stoke-on-Trent, and trust grade junior doctor jobs including intensive care and infectious diseases.
I joined the public health training programme in 2017. My first placement was with the Health Economics Research Centre, where I completed a systematic review of enhanced recovery following hip and knee replacements. This was followed by the MSc in Global Health Science at the University of Oxford. For my dissertation I developed a severity score for people admitted to hospital with acute respiratory infection. I am working to get this score validated and published.
I have started the second year of the programme with a placement in the Thames Valley health protection team. In addition to time in the ‘duty room’ responding to notifications of infectious disease, I am conducting an audit of tuberculosis in the region. After this, I am looking forward to splitting my time between Milton Keynes Council and working on antimicrobial resistance at the University of Oxford.