Note: today is 20 July 2023 and I just found this post in my ‘drafts’ folder. It was written 22 August 2014! I’ve read it through and it seems that the only thing I didn’t get round to doing was putting on a reference list and sorting out some formatting. Or, maybe I had some other points I wanted to make – perhaps more detail on policy process and/or health policy because I don’t touch on all the books who I introduce at the beginning. It’s interesting that at that time I was thinking about doing my PhD in ‘field’ of health in all policies, but now that in the past…..
A few months ago I wrote my Policy Safari post which outlined the reasons for my interest in policy. The interest has got stronger since then – the more I think about it the more I would like my PhD research to be in the ‘field’ of healthy public policy/health in all policies. I’ll write a post soon outlining the background to and use of these ‘ideas’, but in order to start to tease apart what they are and how you seek to achieve these ideals, I think you need to start with two contested concepts that underpin them – what is (public) policy? (plus what are the theories about how it is ‘done’?) and what is health? (plus what are the theories about how it is ‘made’/’damaged’?) As these two concepts are understood in such a multiplicity of ways in isolation then putting them together in phrases such as ‘healthy public policy’ and ‘health in all policies’ is kind of a recipe for complete confusion.