Looking through the latest public health news feeds this week, it would be pretty difficult to miss the fact that we are currently dealing with a rapidly evolving coronavirus outbreak. Messages about other topics either stick out like a sore thumb, or struggle to be noticed. In an eerie way, this echoes the challenges faced by the whistleblowers featured in Episode 2 of Talk Public Health.

That’s right! Our major achievement this month is being able to release to you, our patient and attentive listeners, our very second episode of this current season. As you know, our theme for this entire season is “This is Public Health”, and so we are trying to show you the field exactly as we see it, with the good, the bad and the ugly. With its achievements and its issues, and its podcast presenters with funny accents to boot.

This is not to discourage interested listeners from entering a career in public health, of course. In fact, we hope for quite the opposite effect. We want to show you a profession that is able to reflect and be self-critical, and to change as a result. We hope that as young public health professionals, we give you hope that we are not content with the status quo, and that we are always striving to be part of the self-improvement efforts. In a way, producing this episode is like walking the talk: it is difficult to criticise one’s own professional institutions, but only by encouraging a culture of doing so are we able to pave the way for future whistleblowers to come forward.

Another way that we can appraise ourselves critically is by performing impartial, validated research. We also hope to contribute to the public health field in this way through our research study, PHLOPS, that examines how public health professionals use social media for their ongoing learning needs. Even here, we have strived to be dynamic and driven by the feedback that we receive from our colleagues. In response to what people have told us about their podcast listening habits, we have decided to keep the first wave of our online survey open until we are ready to release episode 3. This means that if you’ve listened to any part of episode 1 OR 2 of this Talk Public Health season, you can still help us out by filling in the survey, here.

Looking ahead to February, we have already finished some of the fascinating, thought-provoking interviews for the episodes that we are hoping to release. We are now packaging these up to deliver to you, adding the cherries and decorations on top. Make sure you subscribe to our mailing list so that you always know the latest from us!