Practice, Policy and Law: A Workshop to Promote Environmental Health as a Career Option to Secondary School Students: Does it Work?

There is a shortage of environmental health practitioners in Australia. As part of a wider response by local and state governments and Environmental Health Australia (formerly The Australian Institute of Environmental Health), we developed a workshop to promote environmental health as a career choice to secondary school students, and then evaluated its success in terms of student engagement to determine whether it provided an appropriate forum for promoting the environmental health profession. We found that most students were engaged, but that there was a strong gender bias, with female students enjoying the workshop more, and also being more likely to consider environmental health as a career than male students. this suggests that the value of the workshop might have limits in addressing the current problem of a highly feminised environmental health workforce. However, it is possible that the gender bias was a result of our assessment methodology. Notwithstanding, our results suggest that the workshop provides a valuable forum for environmental health practitioners to engage with secondary school students; a method that has been shown elsewhere to be a primary determinate in choosing to study environmental health.