My experience of the Public Health course at BSMS has been so positive.
I had good support and used a notetaker who sat alongside me in lectures to make notes so that I could concentrate on what was being said without missing out due to my Deafness.
The study blocks were intensive, but a good way to immerse oneself fully in the modules. I most enjoyed health protection, global public health, and epidemiology. I was able to further develop my research skills, looking at articles and being able to consider their content and see if it was worthy of noting.
I am now a UK public health practitioner on the UK Public Health Register; the accreditation is quite challenging and would have been very difficult to achieve without my Masters in Public Health. It helped me to meet the various competencies.
I would encourage those who are thinking of doing the MSc in Public Health to go for it! Sometimes the mountain can feel hard to climb, but I am so pleased with myself, and that I managed to work through the self-doubt at times.
After seven years working in a public health team, I wanted to have a new challenge and explore public health and Deafness further, so I did a few months of consultancy work to focus on this specifically.
I worked with some clients and then an opportunity came up to work with the British Deaf Association as their national training and consultancy manager.
The role involves raising the profile of sign language, and working with a range of external partners to tackle some of the wider determinants of health – namely around health inequalities, inaccessibility of services due to lack of sign language provision, adverse childhood experiences in terms of Deaf children often being language deprived, and so on.
The UK is on the cusp of a huge change in terms of improving access for Deaf sign language users, and I am hoping I can help to be part of this change and influence things for the better.
The learning experience of my MSc in Public Health and my seven years in the public health team will all be very useful. It's all very exciting, and I've only been at the British Deaf Association for a few weeks so far.
If anyone wants to reach out to me, please follow me on LinkedIn.
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