Jim McManus Director of Public Health

About me

Jim is a GenerationQ Fellow, Director of Public Health at Hertfordshire County Council and Interim President of the Association of Directors of Public Health.

Jim is Lead for Population Health for the Hertfordshire and West Essex Integrated Care System and is an Honorary Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health.

Jim is a Chartered Psychologist, Chartered Scientist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society.  He led ADPH policy work on local outbreak plans and covid-19 suppression including ADPH 'Living Safely with Covid' policy papers.

Jim co-created the national public mental health collaborative for Covid-19 and co-chaired the national review of suicide prevention plans in England. He has just completed three years as Chair of the Behavioural Science and Public Health Network and was a co-author of the National Strategy for Behavioural Science in Public Health. He was a member of the national Faith TaskForce on Covid and is a member of the Oversight Group for the National HIV Strategy.

Jim has worked on population level trauma and recovery after disasters, co-led the national review on local authority suicide reduction plans and has previous experience of setting up trauma response networks.

He is an advocate for behavioural sciences in recovery from the pandemic and recently completed a guide to employing behavioural scientists in local government. He has produced guide on post covid trauma and recovery for public health systems. During the pandemic he worked at national level on Vaccine Equalities and uptake as well as working on social care and school settings.

Jim is a Trustee of St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney, one of the largest and oldest hospices in the UK where he is lead Trustee for HR, Equality and Diversity, and a adviser to the Art of Dying Well Centre at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.  Outside work his interests include powerlifting, which he took up to help recovery from Cancer, cycling and history.

Through GenerationQ, Jim aimed to start embedding the benefits of a prevention approach to all public services in a way that delivers real impact for residents, users and organisations. This started a three- to five-year programme of work with a series of quick wins to achieve savings across the system. Jim explains: ‘I want to make the lives of the residents I serve better, and the health and social care system more efficient and financially sustainable’. Projects arising from this include redesign of preventive servuces including integrating 82 childrens centes with public health nursing, programmes using animal assistants for humans, a major project on energy efficiency and health for people in substandard housing and designing health and wellbeing into two major new town developments in Hertfordshire. 

GenerationQ helped Jim take the different dimensions of leadership needed to achieve system change, enable and encourage people to apply them, and deliver real change. He says that ‘the blend of methods and approaches in GenerationQ excites me, since it brings to life the various domains of leadership and comes from insight and experience’.