Hero Award

Helen is a Senior Environmental Health Officer at Wakefield Council, where her role as Primary Authority Account Manager involves managing all environmental health issues for Wakefield’s Primary Authority partner businesses. These include organisations across retail, manufacturing, logistics and distribution, hospitality and leisure sectors.

She has worked in all areas of environmental health and is a member of the CIEH Food Advisory Panel. Helen began her career in retail management before moving into the logistics and distribution sector. She later completed the NEBOSH Diploma in 1996 and went on to study at Salford University to qualify as an Environmental Health Officer.

During her time working at the University, Zena was Programme Lead for the MSc Environmental Health and MSc Public and Environmental Health Science courses. Prior to working at the University, she was Health Policy lead and Director of 'Living Well West Midlands' for the West Midlands Regional Assembly, where she led large-scale, community-based, health and wellbeing projects.

Zena also worked for many years as an Environmental Health Practitioner, latterly focusing on housing and public health. It was during this time that her concern for social justice, related to people's experience of poor living environments, originated. In particular, her work investigates interactions between housing and health, and the impact of poor and insecure housing on people’s lives.

Amongst other publications, she is a joint author of the second edition of the Environmental Health and Housing book, published in 2018, and a contributor to 'Regulating The Privately Rented Sector’, published in 2022. Recently, she led an international 'Housing, Health and Extreme Events’ conference, bringing together academic, practitioner, and community colleagues from across the world to consider building resilience against extreme events. She is currently working with colleagues on a Healthier Housing project in Oxford.