Environmental Health and a man for all seasons

Peter Phillips is one of our consultants and has been working over in County Antrim since the start of November on a substantial project. While over there, he was tasked with writing some articles for the blog site. This is one such article – it is a long one!

Environmental health is not boring but the way many people pursue it, it can be. I was lucky in that I was trained in and have practiced the career of a generalist. It would be so easy for a modern environmental health practitioner to allow themselves to be channelled into a specialism and get stuck in the same rut for the rest of their professional life.

My gypsy career has provoked horror in several colleagues in the past. When asked what my next job is after finishing a contract with them my usual answer was, ‘No idea, something will come up’ and it always did. The same colleagues have sometimes amazed me when I have asked them why they have stayed in the same job for fourteen or more years when they quite obviously hate it.

The usual answers revolve around pensions or lack of confidence and skills to change. You only live this life once and work is a major part of it. Never stay in work that does not satisfy you any longer than you absolutely have too. When I first started my own business in environmental health consultancy I promised myself that I would make it work; I would have worked part time in a supermarket car park pushing trolleys till it succeeded rather than go back to working full time for somebody else. I have never looked back. I have never advertised and I have more demand for my time than I can possibly cope with. Existing and proposed projects will probably see me well past a happy retirement. In fact, I probably never will fully retire because I enjoy doing what I do so much. I have long since given up agreeing to do work that I didn’t really want to do.
I qualified as an environmental health officer in 1980 and have been in continuous professional practice ever since. I was one of the old school who qualified through a very gruelling and specialised professional diploma; far harder than the modern degree and certainly more relevant to the job. Unfortunately degree mania soon followed all over the world; a trend that continues to blight many young people’s careers in all walks of life. As no practical degree conversion was offered in those days I took a totally self taught, external degree in Geography and Economics, with London University. I never attended a single lecture, because I could not afford it, and went off with my reading list and syllabus. At the appropriate times I sat yearly exams over three years and eventually submitted my field work note book. All my academic projects I based on my work and my everyday life. It is perhaps no surprise that people who tell me that university life is hard get very little sympathy from me.

I have always loved the education side of our work. It seems incredible now, when it is seen as a positive part of environmental health, that I risked disciplinary action in my early career for promoting health education. In those days environmental health education was seen as rocking the boat, as indeed was strong enforcement. There was once a deep professional lethargy in local government and as long as you turned up for your morning coffee nobody much cared what you did with the rest of your day. We currently have swung to the other ridiculous extreme in all aspects of enforcement, where the number crunching has become more important than the actual benefit derived from the actions taken. The main reason I came out of local government initially and went into private industry was so that I could educate and advise. I was very fortunate to be one of several forward thinking people who developed the current courses offered by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and, indeed, their predecessors, offered by St John Ambulance. My lecturing experience has been so diverse as to encompass Cambridge University and Ashridge Management College as well as going into prisons and teaching the inmates.
Like any good consultant I must have developed the skill of sounding convincing even though sometimes I have wondered how an earth I have got involved in some projects. This, I suppose led to numerous published articles and work with the media. For someone without a sound early scientific background (I somehow scraped into environmental health with a principally arts and literature education) I seem to have published alongside far more worthy scientists than I. My work on blue green algae, energy efficient heating and ventilation and ecological approaches to pest control have all found their way onto university reading lists and have attracted republishing in different formats, much to the dumbstruck amazement of my scientist friends who actually know that my understanding of chemistry and physics is little above primary school level. My most gruelling publication was as joint author of a health and safety encyclopaedia, a task which led my predecessor to a nervous breakdown and would probably have eventually sent me the same way; the work being so exacting and detailed. I managed the second update and then moved onto more creative journalism. I had lots of fun working alongside investigative journalists in print, radio and TV. I suppose the thing that gave me my five minutes of fame was Granada TV’s ‘From Hell’ series, particularly the two programmes devoted to restaurants and one to cruise ships, but I actually did far more low profile educative work with TV. Breakfast TV was good and I got on well with presenters because I was happy to go off script and chat about anything they wanted to ask. The hardest bit Of Breakfast TV was doing ‘what the papers say’. As the guest I was supposed to find three or four interesting or funny things to say about that day’s papers. I was not particularly good in the mornings in those days and being shut in a studio lounge with coffee and the papers at some unearthly hour in the morning did not naturally inspire wit without a good deal of work.
Despite occasionally fooling people into believing I have academic or technical knowledge I think deep down I am a practical person. I thoroughly enjoyed being a retained fireman, even though I probably was not a very good one. I have carried out field work in Amazonian Peru and think I may have cut through the South American bureaucracy and actually introduced some minor changes. I have toyed with partial self sufficiency and gathering food from the wild. I have been involved in developing central government schemes to make enforcement officers more helpful to business, such as ‘Fitness for Purpose’ and ‘Safer Food Better Business’ and, as I write, am managing health and safety in the construction of wind turbines. I like solving problems rather than reporting on them.
Variety has been the spice of my professional life. I have worked with royalty and in the seediest parts of society. I have on occasions both prosecuted and defended (when they were in the right) members of the Mafia and I have not yet woken up with a horse’s head. I have had bitter clashes with Masons and elsewhere have respected them for their good work. I have certainly learnt that corruption is not exclusive to any particular membership organisation. I have buried people and exhumed them and, most unusually, was asked to conduct an exorcism. Most importantly I have gained many good friends through work. I have never had a nine to five work pattern and career and social life have been greatly mixed to the mutual benefit of both.