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his April will see oversight of drug and alcohol services pass from the NTA
to Public Health England, the advent of which, according to chief executive
Duncan Selbie, is the ‘opportunity of a lifetime to make health and
prevention everyone’s business’, (
DDN
, December 2012, page 11). As
honorary professor of public health at King’s College London, does Alan
Maryon Davis think that’s realistic, or hyperbole? ‘It’s good to see him being so
optimistic,’ he says. ‘But it is a new beginning and I think, although it’s a mainly
structural change, there are some opportunities there, so let’s think positively about it.’
As an ex-director of public health himself – for the London borough of
Southwark – does he feel the worries that drug and alcohol services won’t be a
priority for many of those directors, when it comes to dividing up the money, are
justified? ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I was chairing a seminar just the other day where there
was great concern about how much would be left for drug and alcohol services
after various other big bites are taken. People were concerned about the patchiness
across the country, because while there may be some guidance coming from the
centre, a lot of it is down to local determination now.’
Given that, how should services be making their case at local level? ‘The case has
been made many times, but they should be basing their appeals on the health harms
and longer-term costs of not dealing with problems, and there’s also, to some extent,
the criminal justice impacts. The trouble is, of course, that you’ve got short-term
budgetary concerns and these massive cuts in local government funding that are going
to continue for the next few years – there’s not much light at the end of the tunnel.’
Despite the ‘very strong’ arguments, many councils are now making those big
cuts, ‘not only to the directly-provided services, but also to their funding of
voluntary services, which is going to have an impact on drugs and alcohol’, he
continues. Alongside this is the huge NHS restructuring programme instigated by
Andrew Lansley – ‘a very unfortunate, not to say potentially highly risky
manoeuvre, the wrong policy at the wrong time,’ Maryon Davis states. ‘But it’s
happening so there’s no point crying over spilt milk. The important thing now is to
try to make best use of it, for the health of the people. I think moving public health
into local government is a good idea, because it does link up with the wider
determinants like housing, employment, education, social care and all of that.’
While he sees Public Health England as a potentially useful organisation, as a
long-term public health practitioner he’s mystified by the decision to dismantle
and merge the Health Protection Agency (HPA). ‘That was a great success, very
highly regarded nationally and internationally, and now it will be absorbed into
this new body, which of course won’t be a quango but a branch of the Department
of Health. So all of these people are being pulled into the civil service to be part of
this massive government department.’
Where the ‘glass is also potentially half full’, however, is that the Department of
Health will be connected with what’s going on at local level and ‘the whole health
protection machinery in a very direct way’, he says. ‘But the downside of course is that
they’re civil servants, and it will be politically driven as well as based on the science.’
*****
Before making the move over to public health, Maryon Davis trained at St Thomas’s
Hospital. ‘I was one of those nerdish kids that used to pore through encyclopaedias
18 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| February 2013
Profile |
Alan Maryon Davis
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Alan Maryon Davis has
spent his life in the public
health arena. As Public
Health England prepares
to oversee drug and alcohol
service provision, he talks
to
David Gilliver
A heal