Public Health Specialist Survey 2025

Public Health Specialist Workforce Capacity Review 2025

The purpose of this data collection tool is to capture the size and composition of the public health specialist workforce, including all individuals on the specialist register and actively working (regardless of job title, e.g., ‘Consultant’) as of 1 October 2025. This review will provide robust evidence on whether significant shifts have occurred in the public health workforce since the last data collection in 2022. At present, these shifts are based on anecdotal reports, making the 2025 data essential to validate and understand these changes.

The data collection tool has three core objectives:

• Monitor workforce trends: To support effective commissioning of public health specialists by tracking changes in the numbers of Directors of Public Health and Public Health Specialists, providing evidence for workforce planning and policy development.
• Inform training provision: To strengthen NHS England’s annual commissioning of specialist training places, ensuring that training supply aligns with current and future workforce demand.
• Enhance workforce intelligence: To improve the quality and consistency of data collection methods across the system, enabling more accurate workforce analysis and better-informed decision making.

The tool is broken down into 3 sections:

Workforce Numbers and Demographics

This part of the data collection captures the overall size and composition of the public health specialist workforce. It includes the total number of staff, their demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, and ethnicity), and details of their employment arrangements, including employer type and contract status.

Unfilled and Vacant Posts

In relation to workforce gaps, the data will identify the number of unfilled Specialist and Director of Public Health posts, alongside the number of positions currently being advertised for these roles. This will provide insight into immediate recruitment challenges and capacity shortfalls.

Workforce Planning:

Looking ahead, the exercise will gather information on how many members of the senior management team are anticipated to retire within the next five years. This will help forecast demand, support succession planning, and ensure the long-term sustainability of leadership capacity within the public health workforce.

Please refer to the guidance when completing the data collection tool.

To understand the demographic make-up of the public health workforce within Local Government Authorities, OHID and UKHSA, we have included questions regarding three protected characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity) in the survey. We include those three as they are relevant variables for workforce planning, either in interests of ensuring future sustainability (age, gender) or a representative workforce (gender, ethnicity).

NHS England will conduct the survey in line with its established information governance policies. Robust governance processes will ensure that all data collected is anonymised, protecting the confidentiality of individual members of public health teams participating within Local Government Authorities, NHS England, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). To further safeguard anonymity, any data values below seven will be suppressed. The aggregated findings will be analysed and incorporated into the 2025 Public Health Capacity Review, which will be published on the NHS England website and shared with both regional and national colleagues across NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

If you have any queries about submitting data, please contact the National Service Desk (NSD) by emailing ssd.nationalservicedesk@nhs.net or calling 0300 303 5035.

To help ensure your query reaches the correct team, kindly include the collection name (Public Health Workforce eCollection) in the subject line of your email. Note that lines are open Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm.