Public health works on populations rather than patients: disease surveillance and outbreak response, immunisation, health promotion, antimicrobial resistance, and the policy and programme design behind all of it. The work is investigating why something is happening across a district, designing an intervention, and then measuring honestly whether it worked.

Medicines sit at the centre of most public health programmes and are frequently the weakest link. Antimicrobial resistance, treatment adherence, substandard and falsified products, and rational prescribing are all pharmacy questions asked at population scale. A pharmacist brings that expertise into rooms where it is usually missing, and can see why a programme that looks sound on paper fails at the dispensing point.

Ghana has an unusually strong route in. The Ghana Field Epidemiology and Laboratory Training Programme, run since 2007 by the School of Public Health at the University of Ghana together with Ghana Health Service and the CDC, trains field epidemiologists at frontline, intermediate, and advanced levels, and its graduates have led hundreds of outbreak investigations. Beyond it sit MPH programmes, Ghana Health Service roles at district and regional level, and the national disease control programmes.