S4E1
· 38:59
Hello, and welcome to season four of Public Health Disrupted with me Xand van Tulleken.
Rochelle:And me, Rochelle Burgess. Xand is a writer and TV presenter, and I'm a community health psychologist and associate professor at the UCL Institute for Global Health. It is so good to be back. Somehow we are on season four. I can't really believe that, but here we are and it's amazing.
Rochelle:It's really exciting to be here again. We've got some great topics lined up for you and as always some really exciting guests to add such amazing insights to these discussions. So Xand, should we remind our listeners anybody who's new to the podcast what Public Health Disrupted is all about?
Xand:Absolutely. I actually, I hadn't realized it was season four until this morning, and I'm kind of amazed by that as well. And I'm thrilled that we've got so much to talk about. So what is public health disrupted all about? It's about public health, more importantly, about the systems that need disrupting to make public health better.
Xand:So join us each month as we try and challenge the status quo of the public health field, asking what needs to change, why and how to get there.
Rochelle:In today's episode, we're going to be taking a deep dive into the world of vaccinations. What are vaccination rates looking like right now? Our guests will be helping us understand why rates in The UK might be falling, and what are the innovative ways in which we can tackle this going forward. We'll be unpacking the concept of herd immunity and examining the perception of vaccinations as a social norm. We will also touch on whether there are any outbreaks on the horizon and what we should be aware of.
Rochelle:We've got a lot of ground to cover today. So Xand, let's get started and introduce today's guests.
Xand:Well, our first guest today is Doctor. Ranj Singh. He is a TV presenter and an NHS clinician. He specialises in the well-being of young people. And I should say he's a friend and a dear colleague of mine from TulleLand, as well as more generally a doctor, because he is the resident doctor on BBC One's Morning Live, and that's a job that I do alongside him.
Xand:He's also but he has a ton of other things going on. He is the co presenter of ITV's primetime series, Save Money, Good Health and Save Money, Lose Weight, and Doctor. Ranj on call. He's the co creating host of BAFTA award winning CBB series, Get Well Soon. And I have to say, as someone who makes children's shows and shows aimed at parents as well, that show is phenomenal.
Xand:And I was always kind of terrified of the fact that he could sing and write it all and do he felt like a triple threat or a quadruple threat or whatever, however many threats he is. He's also a regular medical expert on This Morning. And as well as these kind of flagship shows, he is a regular contributor to The ONE Show, to Inside Out, to Watchdog, to Good Morning Britain, Tonight and Channel five News. In 2018, I'd say he's a quadruple threat. He was dancing in Strictly Come Dancing as a contestant, Absolutely extraordinary.
Xand:So I guess a syncopal threat. As well as that, he's a Sunday Times bestselling author, three brilliant books. I've actually read How to Be a Boy and Do It Your Own Way, and it really is a lovely book if you are the parents of a boy or you are a boy yourself or you're anyone curious about boys. How to Grow Up and Feel Amazing and The No Worries Guide for Boys are his other titles. And two children's school books, and he's also released three of his own very successful picture books, a superhero like you, a superpower like mine, and a super family like ours.
Xand:And I have to say he keeps me honest. He keeps me on track during the show. If I know he's watching, I kind of pay a little more attention to what I'm doing. So it is thrilled that you brought your brilliance and your showbiz to the podcast. Thanks, Rand.
Rochelle:Xand, that is a love letter to Rand. I that was so effusive. It was so lovely. I don't know. I mean, how am I gonna match that with my
Xand:We feel equally effusive about our second guest. We are so If
Rochelle:this was in person, Helen, I'd do that, this little weird thing that I do where I sort of like do a curtsy as if I'm curtsying to the scene. I think that is how amazing I think Helen's work is. So I'll start with like my imaginary curtsy to
Xand:say I'm curtsying as well. There we go.
Rochelle:This is how I will frame my introduction to Helen, who is in the same building as me at UCL and the Institute for Child Health, but yet we've, I don't know if we've actually met in person. So don't be surprised, Helen. I use this podcast to start finding cool women profs that I go knocking on their door all over campus. Helen Bedford is Professor of Children's Health at the UCL Institute of Child Health. Her research focuses on child public health issues and in particular childhood vaccination.
Rochelle:This includes the determinants of vaccine uptake, including vaccine hesitancy. Her research has included parents, health professionals and young people's attitudes and knowledge towards established and new potential vaccines, as well as new uses for established vaccines such as in pregnant women. This reaches has informed national and local policy and practice. She advises a wide range of researchers, organisations and groups on vaccine related health issues, and is an expert spokesperson of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. So a huge welcome to you both.
Rochelle:Thank you so much for being here.
Helen:Thank you for having us.
Xand:Well, it's lovely to see you. Helen, I do wanna start with you because we're in a situation in The UK at the moment that I suppose I thought I would never see in my career. It feels like vaccines are the one thing where I think I'd have to worry about that. Someone else has worked it all out. It rolls out across the population, and yet now we're seeing vaccination rates falling.
Xand:So can you talk a bit about what the current situation is and why it's so concerning?
Helen:Yeah. Thanks, Xand. Actually, I'd like to wind back a bit and first of all, talk about how incredible vaccination is. So if we think about in the 1960s globally, before we had any measles vaccine, you know, millions and millions of children would die of measles. And vaccination is often described as after clean water being the most effective public health intervention we have.
Helen:So let's just set that scene. It's incredible. And what has happened over the last forty years with vaccination globally in protecting children's health and saving lives is immeasurable. But we do have a situation in The UK at the moment where for about the last ten years, every year there's been a little tiny decline in uptake. And I'm talking about childhood vaccination mainly here And I'm talking about the vaccines that babies get in the first year of life.
Helen:So it's a six in one vaccine and MMR vaccine that they get about the age of about 12. Little tiny decline each year, which amounts to about three percent over that ten years. So not massive but worrying. And why has that happened? Well, like everything, lots of different reasons but we know back in 2012 there was a huge reorganisation of the NHS which affected immunisation services which previously were ticking along really nicely but it changed the organisation of them and it made different organisations have different responsibilities and it fragmented how things were working.
Helen:That had a major impact that we're only really just recovering from now. And then of course, there's all the other stuff that we hear about on a daily basis, pressure on general practice, you know, reduction in GPs, reduction in practice nurses. And of course, parents have to take their children to be vaccinated. And if you have to take time off work and you may not get paid for that time off work, All these things can compound the difficulty for parents of actually accessing vaccine services.
Rochelle:That's so interesting and I'm really glad to hear you sort of mention the wider socio structural reasons behind why some of these falls might be happening. Ranj, I wonder if you wanted to drop in there. Do you have any thoughts about this? You know, like where we might start to think about how we address some of these factors and are things like mandatory vaccinations an option? I feel like that's a dangerous word these days to be like, to say something is mandatory automatically kicks in this rejection social mechanism.
Rochelle:But I mean, in Canada where I'm from, a lot of them are mandatory in childhood. Like, you couldn't go to school without them. That was just the way it was.
Ranj:In The UK, we do not like being told what to do. Think it's a cultural thing, and that probably applies to other places as well. So I'm by no means an expert in this area. I am bowing to Helen's expertise. I've been to numerous lectures by Helen on this as well.
Ranj:And I credit you with my training in this area, Helen. Why are they dropping you? Helen has gone through the multitude of reasons. And that's not even the whole picture. I think it's interesting.
Ranj:It's not through a lack of information, because I think we have more information at our fingertips than we ever have done before. The problem is that information isn't really quality controlled necessarily. So people can access everything that they want to know. But the difficulty is that what they are being told isn't necessarily, I think, quality controlled or always reliable. And that's been the difficulty.
Ranj:We have had a proliferation of information and misinformation all at the same time. Actually, misinformation spreads a lot faster, particularly online than accurate stuff. And I think vaccination is one of the things that has fallen prey to that. We've certainly seen that during and since the COVID pandemic, I think that really exemplified how quickly information and bad information can get out there. And that's had ripple effect, I think, on other vaccines, the whole that, you know, certain groups did have to have, mandatory COVID vaccinations.
Ranj:And I think we learned a bit of a lesson that that doesn't always work. We were in a global pandemic. It's a very unique situation. We're not talking about, you know, we don't have that necessarily on a day to day basis with other illnesses. But, yeah, there are there are lots of reasons why the rates have dropped.
Ranj:And how I don't think mandatory vaccinations is going to be the solution, but obviously something needs to be done. And just like there are lots of reasons why it's happening, there are lots of reasons how to tackle it, lots of ways to tackle it. My feeling about vaccination and the way I suppose society is going, is that this isn't a top down solution. I don't think that's working. I think have accurate sources of information out there.
Ranj:We are we are at the mercy of services and resources. And, you know, there's only so much we can do there. But I almost feel like it needs to go. This needs to be dealt with from the bottom up, from grassroots up. So let's talk to specifically to vaccine hesitant communities and find out why.
Ranj:What's the reason? There are historical reasons and often the way they're getting information presented to them doesn't doesn't feel like it applies to them, particularly, for example, from ethnic minority communities. I know that there is a level of sometimes distrust in medical information because of historical and other reasons. But also people don't necessarily understand it in the way that they need to, or it's not put across to them or by the people that they listen to. So let's find out who these communities are listening to.
Ranj:Let's go with them. I think there are certain communities that we can learn from. For example, let's look at monkeypox vaccination in the LGBTQ plus community. That uptake was fantastic. People queued and queued and queued.
Ranj:And that's because this isn't our first pandemic. We know what it's like. So let's take success stories and see if we can pick things out from them. Have a thing about this whole, you know, some people think maybe we should reward GPS more for meeting their targets and things like that. That I completely agree.
Ranj:People need to be paid for the work that they do. The problem perception of that is very different. And this is one of the biggest issues we've got is in the age of social media. There are lots of views that go around online and we don't challenge them quickly enough. We don't offer the counter narrative quickly enough.
Ranj:And that happened during COVID. It was frustrating to see the amount of disinformation and misinformation going around, be it well meaning or deliberately malicious. And the authorities that should have been counteracting that did not get there quick enough, not respond fast enough. And I think that's the challenge we have to now meet. It's not about providing people with information.
Ranj:There's loads of it out there. What we now have to do is try to balance some of the misinformation out there. And I think that's something that isn't going to be easy to do. But I feel like we need to start doing more of it.
Helen:Just to echo 100% what Ranja said, it's about listening to communities, to people and responding appropriately. I don't think we do enough of that listening. I think we have learned things from the COVID pandemic, but I don't think they necessarily apply directly to childhood vaccination, which is a different thing completely. But I do also think that we are bad at responding quickly. So, you know, a lot of where people get information from, say from social media, I don't think there's good evidence to suggest that if you're going to vaccinate your children, you read something on social media, it turns you into a non vaccinator.
Helen:But I do think for people who have concerns, they're often called hesitant. I don't actually like that term with respect to vaccination. I think it's a poor term. But people who have concerns and questions and they go to social media, obviously, you know, it obviously backs up their concerns and we don't want to vacuum. And I think that's what we often have and we need to be filling that vacuum with good information.
Helen:There isn't enough of that. There isn't enough pro vaccine advocacy from all sorts of people, not just from health professionals, but from all sorts of people could be doing a much, you know, a much better job at filling those gaps that are there.
Xand:Can I just ask about that, Yus, because the term I've always used is vaccine hesitant to distinguish from the sort of quite extreme fringe of, I guess, the people we call anti vaxxers? And those there's a different you know, there are multiple reasons why people might hold any of these views, but it feels like there is an extreme group of people who are quite vehemently opposed to any vaccinations and would say, look, they have some quite controversial or incorrect ideas about microchips or conspiracies and things like this. And there's a lot of people who go, Look, I'm just not everything from going, Look, I'm actually just a bit worried about the side effects. Like I'm busy, even for me getting my vaccines this winter, I'm busy. I don't want to feel ill after them.
Xand:So how do you, beyond different communities, there's spectrum a of different reasons why people might drag their heels. How should we label them and maybe label's the wrong height? How do we stick with others? What is the correct term?
Helen:Well, don't know what the correct term is, but to me hesitant is a bit negative. I don't know. I think if we're thinking about anti vaccine, so there are anti vaccine activists who are tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of this spectrum of vaccine acceptance, if you like, but they're often really noisy. So tiny in number, but very, very noisy. And then right at the other end, we've got people who just go along and get their children vaccinated without, you know, without asking any questions.
Helen:I think the benefit of the COVID pandemic and the COVID vaccination is that people are asking more questions. And of course you should ask questions. You know, if you go and have any other medical intervention, you would ask questions, but somehow people who ask questions about vaccination have been labeled as being, you know, maybe a little bit anti vaxx and I think that's wrong, wrong, wrong and we shouldn't be using that terminology for people who are just asking questions.
Xand:So vaccine cautious might be a better way of putting that they have an appropriate level of caution.
Ranj:I have to agree with Helen in the sense that I feel like it is normal to ask questions about vaccines. Absolutely we should do. Because although vaccines are a wonderful health intervention, they are not without their issues. So we've got to be open and honest about this. And it is we should be encouraging people to ask questions.
Ranj:The problem is, you're right. They get lumped in this anti vaccine sort of camp. Like how dare you ask anything about it? You must obviously be anti them, but that's never the case. It's interesting when I work in real life with real patients, I don't encounter very much anti vaccine sentiment.
Ranj:I do encounter a lot of people who are worried, who are cautious because they are hearing so many different things and they just want some information to help. But when I go on social media, for instance, where a lot of us are now, where a lot of us are getting our information, if I was that vaccine cautious person, I am seeing very loud anti vaccine voices, not the vaccine cautious. They don't go online and say, I'm worried. Want a bit more information. They go online to listen and read.
Ranj:And then you have the small but very, very vocal anti vaccine minority who are extremely loud. And when you hear that as a vaccine cautious person, it sways your opinion and it sways your views and it makes you even more anxious about them. And it may completely change your attitude towards them. So that's why I'm so adamant that we need to be in that space counteracting that information with the right people in the right way. We've got to be doing that.
Ranj:I don't think that's going to be an easy thing to do. I think social media companies need to take a hell of a
Xand:lot more
Ranj:responsibility for these sorts of things because they're not taking any at the moment. Any other platform, for instance, on TV, if you had that, they would have regulation, they would have someone saying, hang on a second. You can't just put stuff on there willy nilly. And social media platforms have got away with that. But, yeah, I've gone off on my tangent now, which is what I normally do.
Ranj:I have a little rant. No. But I
Xand:think it's so important. How do you move health care professionals who are talking on the telly who want to do responsible messaging, who believe in vaccines are doing that? What's the balance between scaremongering, dogma, their kind of right frustration that lower vaccination rates will severely harm a lot of people? What what is the kind of way of approaching it?
Helen:That's the million dollar question, isn't it? I mean, it's really difficult. I think it's just about acknowledging that most vaccines have a very good safety profile, but they're not without, you know, some adverse events, and you have to balance that against the diseases. The problem is when half the equation is gone and the diseases have gone because of the vaccines, it's a sort of unequal, you know, it's no longer a balance, isn't it? You know, if you're saying measles is such a terrible disease and it is a terrible disease, but we see so little of it now, although hopefully we can get on onto the possibility of outbreaks a bit later on.
Helen:So all the sort of risk is focused on the vaccine and less so on the disease. And how do you, help parents understand a disease that they've never seen, they may never heard of? You know, it's in the history books as far as they're concerned. I think personal stories are really important here. I mean, I don't know if you were following the recommendation that we should start using chickenpox vaccine, which came in last week.
Helen:So, this will be added to the childhood schedule And there were some really sort of emotional stories from parents of their children who'd suffered, you know, severe complications of chickenpox. And that's not a common complication, but nevertheless devastating. And we need to be doing more of that, I think, sharing those sorts of stories.
Ranj:I totally agree. I think personal testimonies is extremely powerful because it's so relatable for people at home to think that could be me, that could be my child, that could be my loved one. And I think we don't do enough of that. We do this a lot of this sort of top down talking at people and saying, should do this or we should do that because we're the experts. Our job is to tell you what to do.
Ranj:And actually, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's better for people on the ground to be discussing this amongst themselves. And I think showing, for instance, there's a balance here. And I think Xand was alluding to that as well, is we've forgotten what these diseases do. We've forgotten what tetanus does.
Ranj:Tetanus is horrific. But in this country, nobody knows what tetanus does to kids. You go to certain parts of the world, you will see it. Maybe we should start showing people like we do on cigarette packets. I know that's a bit of an extreme, but maybe it's time we started showing people what actually happens when we don't have high enough rates of vaccination.
Ranj:The reemergence of these horrible conditions, people that have gone through this. Have yet to meet a parent or a carer who has had a severe vaccine preventable illness who turns around and says, I'm glad I didn't get the vaccination when my child was due. In fact, it's usually the other way around. It's like, I wish I had, because I now see the reality of what it's like when you don't. But it's got to be done sensitively.
Ranj:It's got to be done with balance, isn't it? Because scaremongering, if you want to call it that, or reality check is what I call it, can I guess have the opposite effect as well?
Helen:It can backfire. The message has to be just right. It's, you know, like the porridge in the fairy story. Can't be too hot. Can't be too cold.
Helen:Just got to be just right. And we need psychologists like Rochelle to help us get it right, get that message at the right level. I think we are doing more of that work with talking to parents, talking to communities, talking to young people about, you know, the messages and what their understanding is. I think more of that is happening now and certainly influencing the material that's available about immunisation, but, you know, there's a lot to do. I mean, if you think about The UK, we're such a diverse population, there's so many different cultures that we need to make sure, you know, are included in that messaging.
Helen:There's a lot to be done.
Xand:Can I come back to your example, Ranch, of monkeypox, because it really struck me? I mean, one of the things I've really loved about all the different campaigning and, health messaging you've done over the years is your personal involvement with issues, whether it was around PrEP or you talking about monkeypox just then, that you're leading by example. The other thing I was gonna ask about the the monkeypox is my understanding was there was a bit of friction there where you had to bring some ID that people were saying they were asking for ID, and they wanted this vaccine. And, actually, anyone showing up to get their monkeypox vaccine should have just been given one. And instead, were sort of going, no.
Xand:We No. Need some paperwork. It was all a bit of a headache and people are getting turned away. And I just wonder about those barriers as well. Do we need to make the system a bit more slick for people?
Ranj:From my perspective, yes. I mean, was an issue with monkeypox around supply and things as well wasn't there and set up for vaccination. And definitely it was tricky sometimes to get access for a lot of people. I mean, you had to have time to queue, to wait and get it done, which it should not have been the case. But there's a lot that can be learned, I think from the LGBTQ plus community and the success of HIV campaigns and prep campaigns and vaccination campaigns and how it's being done.
Ranj:And it's often done by people from the community. That's I think it's a lot of people see themselves and think, yes, I believe this person. You're absolutely right. There was a lot of information that came from central government about monkeypox, which I thought was useless. There was a lot of stuff that was poo pooed because it felt so sterile and it felt soulless and it didn't feel like it applied.
Ranj:But then I do, for example, I'm not blowing my own trumpet, but I did an article for Attitude magazine, blew up, which was free, didn't cost the NHS a single penny. I didn't get paid for it, but it was a big intervention. So there's something to learn from that. Are we putting out our messages on the right platforms for the right people? And are we using the right people to do it?
Ranj:But you're right, the whole system in terms of access probably does need to be a bit slicker. Maybe we do need. And this is part and parcel, I guess, of making it the societal norm is if people are able to just walk in and they happen to have missed the vaccine and they can just get it, then that would be great. Would potentially take away a bit of that one of those barriers potentially. But I don't know.
Ranj:I don't know much about the research behind this, Helen.
Helen:Well, I would certainly argue that poor access is one of the major reasons for under immunization and that an awful lot could be done to improve that just by providing vaccines in places that families go to. Now, came out of my office the other day and what was sitting in front of me, a mobile vaccination centre right opposite me and those kinds of initiatives. So there was a very famous one in Hackney about ten years ago, there was a measles outbreak and they got a bus, they painted it with spots called a spotty bus, very original, and it drove around Hackney parking in supermarket car parks, you know, school playgrounds and they vaccinated about a thousand children. I mean, successful. Also we've seen a lot actually around COVID vaccination, where vaccination was taken to the community and trusted community leaders were involved and the impact that has.
Helen:So we need to be much cleverer about employing those sorts of interventions. Think we're a bit, you know, boxy, it's got to be at the GP and etcetera, etcetera. I mean, we saw practice nurses working in GP surgeries when parents were literally frightened to take their children to be vaccinated, setting up drive through vaccination, you know, so you drove in with your baby, baby got vaccinated through the window. We just need to think outside the box a bit more. School programmes are brilliant.
Helen:I mean, we have had a knock with, as a result of COVID, with the HPV vaccination programme in school, because obviously young people weren't attending school, but that's an incredible achievement. Know, we've got where we had one of the highest uptakes in the world because it's a school based programme, got a nice captive population, bit of peer group pressure, brilliantly.
Rochelle:Helen, I just want to think about that term pressure a bit here because I know that we sort of alluded to outbreaks on the horizon. And I just want I mean, I think that that is also a different kind of pressure, but like sort of this way that forces us to think differently. Is there something, you know, that we should be worried about thinking about?
Helen:Well, measles is always a worry and the reason it's a worry is because it's incredibly infectious, the most infectious disease there is. So it doesn't take much of a decline in vaccine uptake for you to start seeing outbreaks again. And, we're in a situation now where we have had really suboptimal measles vaccine uptake for many years, partly as a result of the discredited, paper, Lancet paper, which was, you know, twenty five years ago, but the ramifications are still around a little bit. Some parents are still scared of MMR vaccine. These things persist for a long time.
Helen:So what we've had is over the year, we've got a combination of a buildup of people that weren't vaccinated when they were very young and now are in their 20s, plus lower than we would like uptake because really you need ninety five percent uptake of two doses of MMR to keep this disease at bay. And we've had this buildup of susceptibles over those years and the United Kingdom Health Security Agency did some modelling and they predicted that particularly in London where vaccine uptake is lower, much lower than the rest of the country, there is the potential for an outbreak of measles between forty thousand and one hundred and sixty thousand cases. Now that's a really worrying prospect because at those numbers of cases, you're going to see so many hospitalisations, so many sick children, so many complications and deaths. You know, this is the reality that unless we can turn this around and we can, because we've got the vaccine, you know, we're in for a problem there.
Xand:The sense I get from both of you really is actually surprisingly optimistic. And actually there are just simple practical, almost logistical technical issues that would go some way towards pushing those numbers back up again. So I'm not feeling quite optimistic compared to where I was at the beginning. I don't know how you're feeling, Rochelle. Are you more optimistic than me generally or not?
Xand:I'm never quite sure.
Rochelle:It's hard to tell. I think it depends on the topic.
Ranj:I have a six
Rochelle:year old who is vaccinated to the nines. I gave him chickenpox vaccine even before it was suggested. I'm very proud of that. I talked to lots of people about it, but I'm also a public health person, so.
Xand:That's very, it feels like it's very important to tell people about it.
Ranj:Well, I
Rochelle:think that is it. You know, like those conversations that I have, I think are most important, like Ranjan and Helen have been saying, there's the microcosms of how people make decisions happen through communication and communication with people that you know and that you trust. I do feel positive. And I sometimes ask this question to my son of like, if you had a magic wand, like what would be like the three things you would do to sort of fix this problem?
Ranj:Am I allowed to say change the government?
Rochelle:It's not that powerful of a wand. Okay. One
Ranj:thing I think we need a specific century led social media anti misinformation squad. I think we need that. Social media is a huge and growing platform. If we don't address that now, it's only gonna become harder. It's like television.
Ranj:Think of it like television. If you had, let's say twenty years ago, people going on TV and actively putting out anti vaccine information, you'd be like, right, we need
Helen:to deal with this. Need to
Ranj:Yeah, but we're not doing that with social media. And I think that needs to be done yesterday. And better regulation of social media in general, which the social media bill was supposed to do. And I don't exactly know where we're going with that at the moment. Absolutely.
Ranj:I think logistics need to be sorted. If we're going to make vaccination the societal norm, it needs to be everywhere. It needs to start young in school so that kids are aware of it and parents are aware of it. Then it kind of trickles upwards. And then the third thing, what would the third thing be?
Ranj:If I could magically magic it all up. I don't know.
Xand:You're doing stuff. You don't have to, like, you are you're kind of being the genie as well. Like, you you also go on the TV and do all this stuff. Your third thing can be keep doing your good work. That's alright.
Xand:You're off the hook. I've seen you do it on the telly.
Ranj:It's fun. Okay.
Xand:I love that. Rochelle's just doing the thing of sitting in silence, making you squirm and be like, no, I asked for three things. Helen, you better have three.
Helen:Okay. Well, I'll be a copycat and I think Ranch is dead right. We've got to get this misinformation on social media sorted big time. We know what we need to do. We need to make sure that parents are able to have a conversation with a health professional who knows what they're talking about, that they get invites to go to get their children vaccinated, that it's made more accessible so it's easier for them to get it.
Helen:And we also need to be looking at our information systems and make sure that our data are good. But all this is going to take money and resources and what we need. We can't wait to train doctors and nurses. We need ready trained people in there now, in there today, doing these, you know, running vaccination clinics and offering vaccination in other places like in, you know, when a child goes into hospital, can they get vaccinated? Not always.
Helen:It's a bit of a no brainer that.
Xand:Wow, that's fascinating. That's incredible.
Helen:There's a lot we can do. There's a lot we can do.
Xand:That's a very positive note for you both to end on. Can we ask you our final question? We always ask every guest that we're interested in disruptive thinking, and I think both of you are permanently disruptive. You're trying to create change. You're trying to shift public opinion and public health in in lots of very important ways.
Xand:Very often, have something that has sort of prodded them early in life or something they've returned to, a piece of art or music or poetry or a book or a song or anything that's disrupted your thinking at some moment in your life. Ranj, I feel like you've got, let's just start with you Ranj.
Ranj:Go on, let's put me on the spot first. I don't know if there's been one specific thing that has disrupted my thinking. But on the topic of art, there's an exhibition in London called Frameless, which is basically a imagine four giant rooms where you go in and they project classic art pieces, everything from like impressionism through to abstract art, through to modern art. And it's an immersive visual, interactive and sound experience. I learned about art at school.
Ranj:I loved art. It was one of the things I was actually good at. But I had never experienced art in this way. And it was a completely new way of experiencing art and opening up this art to people. Like I find Turner's paintings quite boring.
Ranj:I'm not going to lie. I mean, they're quite dramatic. They're interesting. But to a five year old, they're like, what? But I saw kids, like little kids, completely immersed in these classical art masters paintings in a way that I've never seen before.
Ranj:And I think maybe the way we experience art is evolving and using technology and these sorts of immersive environments, I think is opening it up. And I saw that art that I'd seen before countless times in a completely different way. And I was like, I get it. I get why this is so important and I get why it has the impact that it has because I'll be quite open. I don't understand modern art sometimes.
Ranj:I find it a bit weird. I find it a bit like it's just a bunch of shapes and colors and it doesn't really mean anything. And that's coming from an art fan. But I went into this room and I experienced modern art in a completely different way. And I was like, that's changed my mind.
Ranj:Helen.
Helen:Well, this is a really difficult question. I've been thinking about this for days, honestly. And I was going to mention an exhibition that I saw yesterday as well. We're real arty party types, aren't we? At my advanced stage, there's far too much dimension but I really love photography and yesterday went to this fantastic exhibition at the Hayward gallery, Tsujimoto.
Helen:He's a photographer and architect and he'd got lots of fascinating concepts there. But the thing that really, really, really struck home was these seascapes that he'd taken, different seas and lakes around the world. They were almost like abstract art. They were so beautiful, so mesmerising. And his observation was, can someone today view a scene just as primitive man did?
Helen:And probably the sea is the only thing that remains as it would have done way back.
Xand:I love that. That's brilliant. Oh, you guys are brilliant. Thank you so much both of you for all the thought and and brilliance and effort that you've put in. And and I think anyone who's listening, whether they're parents, child, health care professional, broadcaster,
Ranj:will
Xand:have got something amazing out of it today.
Helen:Thanks. That was fun. Thank you.
Ranj:Thank you.
Rochelle:You've been listening to Public Health Disrupted. This episode was presented by me, Rochelle Burgess and Xand van Tulleken, produced by UCL Health of the Public and edited by Annabel Buckland at Decibel Creative. Our thanks again to today's amazing guests, Round Singh and Helen Bedford.
Xand:And if you'd like to hear more of these fascinating discussions from UCL Health of the Public, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast so you don't miss any future episodes and come and discover more online and keep up with the school's latest news, events and research. Just Google UCL Health of the Public. This podcast is brought to you by UCL Minds, bringing together UCL knowledge, insights and expertise through events, digital content and activities that are open to everyone.
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