ABOUT
The Public Health Academy
The Public Health Academy is a public health consultancy that specialises in the delivery of online and onsite public health training. The courses have been delivered to health department, public health unit and federal government staff across Australia.
Meet the Founder
Dr Ranil Appuhamy - Founder and Principal Consultant
Dr. Appuhamy completed his medical training in New Zealand and moved to Australia, working in hospitals in the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and Victoria. Following his passion in Public health Medicine, he completed his advanced training and public health fellowship in 2011. He has since worked in the field of Public Health locally, nationally and internationally across a wide range of public health disciplines including: communicable disease control, environmental health, health promotion, policy, tobacco control and multicultural health. He is an excellent public speaker delivering presentations to health professionals, international delegates, students and the general public and has appeared in many print, radio and television interviews. In 2014, he received the ACT Chief Health Officer Award for excellence and outstanding service.
He has a strong interest in global public health and in 2006, completed a Masters of International Public Health at the University of Sydney. He worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization where he was responsible for building capacity of member states in the Western Pacific Region on International Health Regulations. He has also worked as an independent volunteer providing medical relief in Sri Lanka after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.
He has extensive experience in Communicable Disease Control and has led several acute response teams, managing a diverse range of outbreaks. He was an executive member of the Communicable Disease Network of Australia, the peak national public health body for communicable diseases and has conducted research and published scientific articles across a range of communicable disease issues. He has also been responsible for developing policy, guidelines and technical documents at a state, national and international level.
Dr. Appuhamy is passionate about teaching and is well known for his innovative teaching methods that make technical and complex concepts easy to understand. He was a public health lecturer at the Australian National University teaching public health to medical students across all 4 years of their study and has been the field supervisor for many trainee public health physicians. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
His teaching methods had a global impact when he created two YouTube channels - One on Public Health and the other on communicable diseases. In 2017, the public health channel was recognised as one of the top 100 health channels in the world. The channels have over 1.1 million views and 17,000 subscribers. The videos from these channels have been used by health professionals, schools, universities and Non-Governmental Organisations all over the world. The videos have also been featured on the World Health Organization website.
Combining his passion for teaching and public health, he founded the Public Health Academy with a simple and bold ambition – to make public health education, simple, enjoyable and easily available to anyone! The Public Health Academy runs online training courses on public health and also delivers onsite public health training courses across Australia.