All health professionals need an understanding of the determinants of good health at population level. This has been recognised both nationally in guidance to medical and nursing schools and internationally by the World Health Organization. To help their patients through and beyond the episodes of illness that bring them into surgeries and hospitals, doctors need to understand the factors that propel patients there in the first place. Moreover, as the costs of health care increase across the globe, tomorrow’s health professionals need a sound understanding of population-based approaches to promoting health and preventing ill health.

The first edition of this book was highly commended and the second edition begins with a section covering core public health knowledge and skills. I am pleased to see that the first chapter considers public health leadership. This is crucially important for being, in the jargon of the times, ‘distributed’. All of us working in the UK National Health Service, at one level or another, share responsibility for leadership, whether clinical or managerial, and for ensuring that priority is given to preventive care or to improving the curative services we offer.

I note that the second half of the book adopts the same life-course approach to improving population health as was used in the recent White Paper on public health: ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy People’. That too stresses the importance of multi-sectoral working to tackle the main causes of mortality and morbidity from infancy onwards.