On 12 September Professor Coggon attended Public Health England’s annual conference and participated in a session entitled ‘Insurrection, Inspiration and Operation: Implementing the Right to Health’.

Introduced and chaired by Professor Paul Lincoln, audience discussion was informed by two talks: Professor Coggon explained practical and philosophical aspects of the right to health; Cath Denholm, Director of Strategy at NHS Scotland, spoke about the use of the Right to Health and a human rights-based approach in Scotland.

The discussion considered how, for policy and practice, there are important opportunities to understand and apply human rights as means of improving health and addressing systemic, unfair health inequalities.

On 18 September Professor Coggon travelled to Sweden to speak in the ongoing Stockholm Public Health Lecture Series, hosted by the Department of Public Health Sciences at the Karolinska Institute and the Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine at Stockholm City Council.

His lecture was entitled ‘Can Governments Implement Fair Health? An Ethical Take on Swedish Public Health Policy’. Dr Anna Månsdotter, Head of Unit at the Public Health Agency of Sweden and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at the Karolinska Institute, presented the background to the Swedish Government’s approach to public health, leading up to the recent ‘Good and equitable public health – an advanced public health policy’.

Professor Coggon’s lecture explored the nature of public health ethics and its relationship with policy, law, and practice, and looked at some of the challenges for Sweden’s ambitious policy, which aims equitably to transform the public’s health within a generation.