Missed this week’s email? Welcome to the online edition of Public Health Careers Weekly. Every Friday, we publish carefully selected public health opportunities, sector updates and practical career advice to help you build your career in UK public health. If you’d like future editions delivered straight to your inbox every Friday, subscribe to Public Health Careers Weekly.
This week’s opportunities show how public health professionals are being recruited to turn evidence into decisions across planning, cancer surveillance, housing, climate resilience and research.
🌟 Opportunity of the Week
Public Health Principal
Oxfordshire County Council Salary: £65,675–£69,215 Closing date: 30 October 2026 Location: Oxford Contract:Permanent, full-time
This role leads Oxfordshire’s Healthy Place Shaping work, influencing how planning, housing, transport, green space and climate adaptation affect health and inequalities. The successful applicant will develop evidence-informed business cases, influence senior decision-makers and help embed health within council policies and investments.
Why it matters: This is an excellent example of public health leadership beyond traditional health services. It would suit someone with strong experience in wider determinants, partnership working, commissioning or strategic policy.
💼 Featured Opportunities
Information Analyst Specialist
Public Health Wales Salary: Band 6, £40,559–£48,841 pro rata Closing date: 29 October 2026 Location: CardiffContract: Permanent, part-time
Working within the Wales Cancer Registry, this post covers data linkage, validation, SQL analysis, surveillance and the production of intelligence for research, policy and service planning.
Why it matters: It offers a clear route into specialist national public health intelligence for someone with strong healthcare data, database and quality-assurance experience.
Research Assistant
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Salary: £40,784–£46,643 Closing date: 30 October 2026 Location:London Contract: Fixed term to 31 May 2028, full-time
The NIHR-funded CoSine project is evaluating the health effects of energy-efficiency improvements for low-income households. The role uses linked housing and healthcare data and requires experience in policy evaluation, statistics and software such as R or Stata.
Why it matters: This is a strong opportunity for a quantitative MPH graduate interested in health inequalities, climate resilience and evaluating policies outside the healthcare system.
Research Fellow in Applied Health Research
University of East Anglia Salary: £48,822–£56,535 pro rata Closing date: 28 October 2026 Location: NorwichContract: Three years, 0.6 FTE
This role leads training and support for international PhD researchers while contributing to research bids and publications. Applicants need a PhD, an emerging research profile and experience supporting doctoral researchers.
Why it matters: It provides a part-time route into research leadership for professionals from public health, epidemiology, behavioural science, implementation science or allied health backgrounds.
📰 This Week in Public Health
COVID-19 Inquiry reports on the care sector
What changed: The UK COVID-19 Inquiry published its Module 6 report examining the pandemic’s impact on the UK care sector. Public Health Scotland said it would apply the lessons to strengthen future public health responses.
Why it matters: The findings will influence preparedness, infection prevention, care-sector resilience and how public bodies include social care in emergency planning.
Read the Public Health Scotland response
Great Britain will continue recognising CE-marked medical devices
What changed: The government confirmed on 21 October that CE-marked medical devices and diagnostic products will continue to be accepted in Great Britain on a long-term basis. More than 90% of registered devices currently carry a CE mark.
Why it matters: This provides greater certainty around access and supply while placing continued importance on post-market surveillance, safety reporting and regulation of emerging technologies.
Commercial clinical-trial set-up times fall by 35%
What changed: Government figures show the average set-up time for commercial trials fell from 153 to 100 days. All 24 commercial trials recorded during the relevant three-month period were established within 150 days.
Why it matters: Faster set-up can improve access to research, but public health and research teams will still need to monitor whether participation reaches underserved populations across different regions.
🎓 Learning Opportunity
NHS England: All Our Health
This free collection of bite-sized e-learning sessions covers prevention, health protection and wellbeing, with topics including cardiovascular disease, antimicrobial resistance, homelessness, physical activity and social prescribing.
Why it matters: Completing one relevant session can help you strengthen the policy and evidence context behind an application example, particularly if you are moving into public health from another sector.
💡 Career Insight
Evidence translation is becoming a core career skill
This week’s roles span different settings, but they share one requirement: making evidence useful to other people.
That might mean turning linked data into policy evaluation, cancer records into national intelligence, or public health evidence into planning and housing decisions. Technical competence remains important, but employers also want people who can explain implications, make recommendations and influence action.
When planning your development, look for opportunities to practise both analysis and decision support.
✍️ Application Tip
Show your professional judgment, not only the task
A strong application example should explain more than what you produced. Use this sequence:
What evidence or information did you assess?
What judgment did you make?
What did you recommend or prioritise?
What changed as a result?
What limitation or uncertainty did you manage?
This helps recruiters see how you think, especially for roles involving competing priorities, incomplete evidence or sensitive decisions.
📄 PHCH Resource of the Week
Career Roadmaps
If you are deciding between public health intelligence, research and strategic health-improvement roles, the PHCH Career Roadmaps can help you compare common entry points, transferable skills and realistic next steps.
Use them to identify one capability to build next rather than trying to become qualified for every public health pathway at once.
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