Keeping our focus on suicide prevention

Preventing suicide is an important area of work for PHE.
Professor Kevin Fenton, MD, PhD, FFPH, is the Public Health England National Director for Health and Wellbeing. In this role he oversees PHE's national prevention programmes including screening for cancer and other conditions, Health Checks, national health marketing campaigns, public mental health, and a range of wellbeing programmes for infants, youth, adults and older adults. The Health and Wellbeing Directorate also leads PHE's Health Equity portfolio with a range of programmes and activities focused on addressing the social determinants of health, and promoting settings-based approaches to health improvement.
Professor Fenton was previously the director of the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a position he held for seven years from November 2005. He also served as chief of CDC’s National Syphilis Elimination Effort and has worked in research, epidemiology, and the prevention of HIV and other STDs since 1995. Previously he was the director of the HIV and STI Department at the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency.
He attended medical school in Jamaica, obtained his master's in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University College London. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 peer-reviewed scientific articles and policy reports. He is a speaker in great demand and speaks Spanish and French.
Preventing suicide is an important area of work for PHE.
The end of 2016 marks the fourth year since the creation of PHE’s health and wellbeing directorate – a dynamic period marked by many major accomplishments and new challenges.
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