Starting a new job can be a challenge. You don’t know where the loos are, or what the convention about making tea for your colleagues might be; the IT might be different, and how do you book time off?

Imagine all that, as well as a step up in responsibility – and then add a global pandemic, a newly announced lockdown meaning none of your new colleagues are in the office, and you’re in charge of keeping people safe.

Professor Steve Maddern does not have to imagine. That’s exactly what happened to him when he started work as Swindon Borough Council’s Director of Public Health.

Mr Maddern, who is soon to leave for a new job at Plymouth City Council, joined Swindon immediately after the first lockdown was announced.

He said: ”Public health has always been about prevention of communicable diseases from when the role started in local authorities 177 years ago.

"It’s always been about protecting health so I was textbook ready for the situation, if you like, it is what we are trained to do.

“I  had to come in to get my laptop and the office was completely empty, and I was nervous about that aspect of the job.

"I was confident I could do it, but I didn’t know who were the people best placed to help me do what I wanted to get done, and there weren’t in the office to ask, so that was very challenging,

“But the council was phenomenal, and it was probably the best induction I’ve ever had, working with such a wide range of people. But it was interesting: 'Hi I’m Steve. Can you help me open a test centre?' things like that,"

As director of public health, Mr Maddern was responsible for the dissemination of the government’s messaging on what to do to prevent the spread of  Covid 19, including what seemed an ever-changing set of rules and regulations.

He became probably the most recognised of all Swindon’s directors of public health through regular appearances on Facebook Live, and his curled moustache would not have hurt. Mr Madden joked: “Some people accused me of spending more time on my moustache than the pandemic, but I assure you, it only takes a second in the morning.”

He described Swindon as ‘the canary in the coal mine’ for the South West during the pandemic: “We had a disproportionately high number of cases and deaths compared to other places in the South West.

"But if you compare us to statistical neighbours, like Leicester and Peterborough, we fared relatively well, in the middle.

“We had the first major outbreak in the South West and ended up on the national watchlist. But we did the best we could with the resources and knowledge we had at the time.

“We, and most local authorities, responded incredibly well in the circumstances at the time.”

It’s always a delicate matter to suggest something good came out of a pandemic that killed, or damaged, so many people, but Mr Maddern acknowledges that the council learned a lot from the experience and is in a much better placed to help its residents: “Swindon is wonderfully diverse, with multiple communities speaking multiple languages.

“One thing that came out of Covid is how to engage with those communities on a really granular level, not just to give information, but work with them to understand why they did what they did, or didn’t do.

“If we could have had those relationships beforehand it would have been better. But we have those links, and we’ve built the trust, so if we had a similar scenario again, we have learned how best to work with different communities.

“We’ve created a range of community profiles showing the health needs and challenges of specific communities.”

Another of Mr Maddern’s successes is getting the borough council to adopt a ‘whole systems’ approach to a number of health issues, particularly obesity and physical activity.

This means using aspects of the council’s work everywhere to help public health: an example would be to use the planning system to make sure new developments help and encourage people to get about on foot or on a bicycle.

Another would be the newly introduced policy of restricting adverts for unhealthy food and drink on the bus shelters the council owns.

Mr Maddern said: ”We’ve gone from telling people what to do, which doesn’t work, to nudging them. And now using all the systems to influence people to make a healthy choice.”

Mr Maddern is returning to the city of his birth when he goes to work in Plymouth, but he will always be fond of Swindon: “I’ve lived and worked in Swindon, I’m sad to leave the organisation and the town, but it’s the next career step for me, and I’m excited to go back to Plymouth.

“But it was a phenomenal experience working here.”

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