New public health body must not forget health improvement, experts warn

Dear Editor. I was employed at HPA from 2008. Then at PHE from 2013 until 2020.
I was a programme manager who worked on the Pandemic in 2009. I reported the Pandemic Flu programme board.
Your article references health protection vs health promotion and that is a balance that was generally easier to resource in HPA as the priorities were clear. That maybe the reasons for now going full circle from being all things to all people (in a public health sense) to spreading a very low amount of funding very thinly. Within HPA this has resulted in insepid and weak leadership. My last years were spent in Strategy a department set up to set the direction of travel for PHE which was the last thing it did despite having over 50 highly paid managers.
It's clear from reports that the new agency is going to be focused on preventing another Pandemic. This is a Frank admission of past failures and has to be remembered that there will be no or very few redundancies when forming the new agency. So exactly the same people involved with the audition of Dido Harding. There is nothing to add to well documented waste around Track and Trace only to say that you could have formed the best PH agency in the world for the next 5 years for what was wasted, not to mention a health improvement arm to rival the whole of Europe tackling massive issues such as Diabetes and Addiction..