ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 dealt with the philosophy and set out some of the skills of environmental health practice. In this section of this chapter there is further examination of some of the core skills that unite those engaged in Environmental Health practice, the mastery of which might be taken as a mark of the practitioners’ ‘competence’. It makes no distinction between the EHP primarily working in public sector enforcement, and the EHP in industry, as both are seen to be committed to health improvement, though by different means. However, it also challenges the notion that the day of the ‘generalist’ EHP – trained across a range of disciplines – might be over and that the best hope for the future might lie in the trainee practitioner opting from the start to pursue a ‘specialism’ – currently, food safety (in its broadest sense), environmental protection, occupational health and safety, housing and public health or health protection. It will be argued that too great a dependency on
initial training to deliver a person that can perform a specialist job may unwittingly omit those aspects of cognitive and professional development that arise from processing information about a range of different hazards, whilst weighing-up disparate risk factors; what one hears many practitioners suggest is the
defining feature of the EHP. To this end, the effective practitioner will understand how a working knowledge and understanding of risk assessment and risk management across the whole gamut of environmental health is essential, regardless of where they practice.
