Ruth Hutt

Ruth has been the Director of Public Health at Lambeth Council since February 2017. She is also a vice chair of the London Association of Directors of Public Health. Since early 2020 she has been leading Lambeth Council’s public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

She has been a member of the Lambeth Together Partnership Board since its inception, and previously sat on the Lambeth CCG governing body. She oversees the development and implementation of the Lambeth Health and Wellbeing Strategy and provides public health advise to the Lambeth Together partnership in particular through the lens of addressing inequalities.

Ruth started her career as a nurse training in Southampton but moved to London to study Tropical Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the mid 1990s. She discovered her passion for public health while working in paediatrics in the West Bank and Gaza, recognising the potential for preventing much of what was being treated in hospital. In 2000 she became one of the first non-medics to undertake and complete public health training. She has had a varied public health career, working in Public Health policy research at the Kings Fund, for state government in Australia on health reform, and in the NHS and local government in SE London. She is committed to using public health leadership, skills and practice to address inequalities in health as well as wider social inequalities by working with statutory sector partners, voluntary and community sector organisations and local communities.