A new conceptualization of the professional practice of environmental health: an Australian qualitative study

Abstract

Environmental health professionals play a significant role in preventing and addressing public health problems. Improving this area of practice continues to be a key strategy of the Australian Government; however, achieving this outcome presents several challenges. These challenges relate to the changing context of the practice and the complexities inherent in the practice itself. To address this problem, we investigated the qualitatively different ways environmental health professionals experienced their practice in Australia to establish a new conceptualization of practice. Phenomenographic qualitative methods underpinned this study, involving open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 19 environmental health professionals from diverse backgrounds and practice settings. The study revealed four qualitatively different ways of experiencing the professional practice of environmental health: ‘protecting’, ‘helping’, ‘collaborating’, and ‘leading and innovating’. These different ways were logically linked by five themes of expanding awareness to form a Holistic Experiential Description of Practice (HEDP), representing a new and novel conceptualization of the professional practice of environmental health. We propose that these findings provide a more useful way to conceptualize this area of practice than the current descriptions allow.

Keywords

• Environmental health
• professions
• practice
• phenomenography
• qualitative