Black Women and Public Health in the UK

I was appointed as a district health promotion manager in West Birmingham in the West Midlands in the UK in September 1984, where I was one of a very small number of Black health promotion managers in the whole of the UK. I established and developed a health promotion department in an area of Birmingham with a very diverse and multicultural population. At the time of my appointment, health education departments were being renamed health promotion departments, and the work of the departments was being refocused from behavior-change approaches to addressing inequalities in health. The World Health Organization (WHO, 1981) had developed the Health for All by the Year 2000 initiative, and there were thirty-eight targets focused on reducing inequalities in health. This heralded a need to move beyond health education, which focused on giving advice on healthy lifestyles and educating about health