We’ve put together a list of books related to Public Health. We put a question out to colleagues and friends on Twitter and this is what came back…

Local Authorities and the Social Determinants of Health

As many social inequalities widen, this is a crucial survey of local authorities’ evolving role in health, social care and wellbeing.

Health and social and public policy experts review structural changes in provision and procurement, and explore social determinants of health including intergenerational needs and housing. With detailed assessments of regional disparities and case studies of effective strategies and interventions from local authorities, this collaborative study addresses complex issues (Wicked Issues), considers where responsibility for wellbeing lies and points the way to future policy-making.

The Centre for Partnering (CfP) is a key outcome of this innovative review along with Bonner’s previous work Social Determinants of Health (2017).

The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World

There are dramatic differences in health between countries and within countries. But this is not a simple matter of rich and poor. A poor man in Glasgow is rich compared to the average Indian, but the Glaswegian's life expectancy is 8 years shorter. The Indian is dying of infectious disease linked to his poverty; the Glaswegian of violent death, suicide, heart disease linked to a rich country's version of disadvantage. In all countries, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage, dramatically so. Within countries, the higher the social status of individuals the better is their health.

These health inequalities defy usual explanations. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasised access to technical solutions - improved medical care, sanitation, and control of disease vectors; or behaviours - smoking, drinking - obesity, linked to diabetes, heart disease and cancer. These approaches only go so far. Creating the conditions for people to lead flourishing lives, and thus empowering individuals and communities, is key to reduction of health inequalities.

In addition to the scale of material success, your position in the social hierarchy also directly affects your health, the higher you are on the social scale, the longer you will live and the better your health will be. As people change rank, so their health risk changes.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone

Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Australians? The answer: inequality.

This groundbreaking book, based on years of research, provides hard evidence to show:

How almost everything - from life expectancy to mental illness, violence to illiteracy - is affected not by how wealthy a society is, but how equal it isThat societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are bad for everyone in them - including the well-offHow we can find positive solutions and move towards a happier, fairer future

Urgent, provocative and genuinely uplifting, The Spirit Level has been heralded as providing a new way of thinking about ourselves and our communities, and could change the way you see the world.

I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That

The very best journalism from one of Britain’s most admired and outspoken science writers, author of the bestselling Bad Science and Bad Pharma.

In Bad Science, Ben Goldacre hilariously exposed the tricks that quacks and journalists use to distort science. In Bad Pharma, he put the $600 billion global pharmaceutical industry under the microscope. Now the pick of the journalism by one of our wittiest, most indignant and most fearless commentators on the worlds of medicine and science is collected in one volume.

Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance

Public Health and Epidemiology at a Glance is a highly visual introduction to the key concepts and major themes of population health. With comprehensive coverage of all the core topics covered at medical school, it helps students understand the determinants of health and their study, from personal lifestyle choices and behaviour, to environmental, social and economic factors. This fully updated new edition features: More coverage of audit and quality improvement techniques Brand new sections on maternal and child health, and health of older people New chapters on social determinants of health and guideline development Expanded self-assessment material This accessible guide is an invaluable resource for medical and healthcare students, junior doctors, and those preparing for a career in epidemiology and public health.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems

In this revolutionary book, prize-winning economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. From immigration to inequality, slowing growth to accelerating climate change, we have the resources to address the challenges we face but we are so often blinded by ideology.

Original, provocative and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times offers the newthinking that we need. It builds on cutting-edge research in economics - and years of exploring the most effective solutions to alleviate extreme poverty - to make a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. A much-needed antidote to polarized discourse, this book shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

Status Syndrome: How Your Place on the Social Gradient Directly Affects Your Health

Why do Oscar winners live for an average of four years longer than other Hollywood actors?Who experiences the most stress - the decision-makers or those who carry out their orders?Why do the Japanese have better health than other rich populations, and Keralans in India have better health than other poor populations - and what do they have in common?

In this eye-opening book, internationally renowned epidemiologist Michael Marmot sets out to answer these and many other fascinating questions in order to understand the relationship between where we stand in the social hierarchy and our health and longevity. It is based on more than thirty years of front-line research between health and social circumstances. Marmot's work has taken him round the world showing the similar patterns that could be affecting the length of your life - and how you can change it.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

Why do Oscar winners live for an average of four years longer than other Hollywood actors?Who experiences the most stress - the decision-makers or those who carry out their orders?Why do the Japanese have better health than other rich populations, and Keralans in India have better health than other poor populations - and what do they have in common?

In this eye-opening book, internationally renowned epidemiologist Michael Marmot sets out to answer these and many other fascinating questions in order to understand the relationship between where we stand in the social hierarchy and our health and longevity. It is based on more than thirty years of front-line research between health and social circumstances. Marmot's work has taken him round the world showing the similar patterns that could be affecting the length of your life - and how you can change it.

Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice 4e (Oxford Medical Handbooks)

The award-winning Oxford Handbook of Public Health Practice remains the first resort for practitioners in the field. Structured into practical sections addressed towards professional competencies and translating evidence into policy, this Handbook provides concise summaries and covers real issues from across the globe, providing a world of experience at your fingertips.

Easy-to-use, concise, and practical, this Handbook is divided into seven parts that focus on the vital areas of this broad discipline. Reflecting recent advances, the most promising developments in the practice of public health are presented, along with essential summaries of the core disciplines. Specific sections are devoted to the development of professional competencies including negotiation, communicating risk to the public, community action, and translating evidence into policy.

Written by an international team of experts, and considering both social and scientific advances since the previous edition, this Handbook will assist students, trainees and practitioners around the world with its enriched information on the management of disasters, epidemics, health behaviour, acute and chronic disease prevention, community and government action, environmental heath, vulnerable populations, and more.

Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives

In 2002, a dynamic doctor named Thomas Frieden became health commissioner of New York City. With support from the new mayor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, Frieden and his health department team prohibited smoking in bars, outlawed trans fats in restaurants, and attempted to cap the size of sodas, among other groundbreaking actions. The initiatives drew heated criticism, but they worked: by 2011, 450,000 people had quit smoking, childhood obesity rates were falling, and life expectancy was growing.

Saving Gotham is the behind-the-scenes story of the most controversial--and successful--public health initiative of our time. Thomas A. Farley, MD, MPH, who succeeded Frieden as health commissioner, introduces a team of doctors who accepted the challenge of public health: to care for each of New York City's eight million inhabitants as their own patients. The biggest threats they faced were not cholera or chemical toxins or lack of medical care but instead habits like smoking and unhealthy eating. As these doctors pressed to solve these problems, they found themselves battling those who encouraged those habits, and they reshaped their own agency for a different sort of fight.

Farley shows what happens when science-driven doctors are given the political cover to make society-wide changes to protect people from today's health risks--and how industries exploit legislatures, the courts, the media, and public opinion to undermine them. With Washington caught in partisan paralysis and New York City's ideas spreading around the world, Saving Gotham demonstrates how government--local government--can protect its citizens and transform health for everyone.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness

Nudge is about choices - how we make them and how we can make better ones. Every day we make decisions: about the things that we buy or the meals we eat; about the investments we make or our children's health and education; even the causes that we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. We are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. And, as Thaler and Sunstein show, no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way. By knowing how people think, we can make it easier for them to choose what is best for them, their families and society. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and original research, the authors demonstrate how to nudge us in the right directions, without restricting our freedom of choice.

Donaldsons' Essential Public Health

Donaldsons’ Essential Public Health has been in continuous print for 35 years, evolving through successive editions. This unrivalled record of success for a textbook of public health shows the enduring appeal of its content, style, and accessibility to generations of students and practitioners. For many of today’s national and global public health leaders, the book was their guide as they began their careers, their benchmark as they passed their examinations and professional accreditation, and remains their companion as a source of reference and refreshed knowledge for teaching and practice.

The book brings together, in one volume, the main health problems experienced by populations and by the key groups within them, the strategies for promoting health and preventing disease, the principles and applications of epidemiology, the main themes of health policy, and a description of health service provision.

This fourth edition marks the biggest change to the book in 20 years. For the first time it sets each key subject area in a global health context, whilst retaining its traditional strength in covering population health for the United Kingdom.

The Sociology of Health and Illness

Sarah Nettleton's The Sociology of Health and Illness has become a cornerstone text, popular with students and academics alike for its rigorous and accessible overview of the field. Building on these strengths, the third edition integrates fresh insights from the current literature with the core tenets of traditional medical sociology, providing students with a thorough grounding in the sociology of health and illness. The text covers a diversity of topics and draws on a wide range of analytic approaches, spanning issues such as the social construction of medical knowledge, the analysis of lay health beliefs, concepts of lifestyles and risk, the experience of illness and the sociology of the body. It also explores matters which are central to health policy, such as professional-patient relationships, health inequalities and the changing nature of health care work. Each chapter in the book has been revised and updated, with substantial new material in particular on the sociology of diagnosis, body work, and a whole new chapter on the sociology of health technology. Written for students of the social sciences who opt to study the field of health and illness in greater depth, this book will also continue to appeal to students taking vocational degrees, such as nursing, who require a sociological grounding in the area. Thoroughly revised and fully updated, the third edition of Sarah Nettleton s book will prove invaluable to anyone looking for a clear and engaging introduction to contemporary debates within the sociology of health and illness.

Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health

Alcohol - a simple molecule that can induce so much pleasure and pain at the same time... As the most harmful drug in the UK, it has a profound and wide-reaching impact on our health and on society at large. Drink? is the first book of its kind, written by a scientist and rooted in 40 years of medical research and hands-on experience treating patients. Professor David Nutt cuts through the noise to explain the long- and short-term effects of alcohol, makes complex science digestible and takes readers through its journey inside the body and brain from the very first sip.

Drink? holds the key to all the questions you want to know the answers to, covering mental health, sleep, hormones, fertility and addiction. It sheds light on what 'responsible drinking' truly means and equips us with the essential knowledge we all need to make rational, informed decisions about our consumption now and in the future.

Drugs without the hot air: Making Sense of Legal and Illegal Drugs

The dangers of illegal drugs are well known and rarely disputed, but how harmful are alcohol and tobacco by comparison? What are we missing by banning medical research into magic mushrooms, LSD and cannabis? Can they be sources of valuable treatments? The second edition of Drugs without the hot air looks at the science to allow anyone to make rational decisions based on objective evidence, asking: *What is addiction? Is there an addictive personality? *What is the role of cannabis in treating epilepsy? *How harmful is vaping? *How can psychedelics treat depression? *Where is the opioid crisis taking us?

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