While health leaders are focused on delivering care for the sick and injured, Keith Reid said there was a bigger picture to consider about our general condition.
And it is his role as director of public health in Swansea Bay to sketch that picture.
Dr Reid said he aimed to broaden the health board's focus onto the population's health and wellbeing, not just the treating of patients in hospital and surgeries, as important as that is.
"Ill health arises because communities are not functioning well," he said.
This could be due to inadequate housing, education, employment opportunities, and a lack of access to leisure facilities, among other things.
Dr Reid said Swansea and Neath Port Talbot still had a lot of poverty and that poor mental health and well-being were expressed by "relatively high" suicide rates and levels of substance misuse which differed to other parts of Wales.
He would like to find a way of addressing people's health needs better, as well as making healthcare roles more attractive for staff in terms of pay and working environment.
Dr Reid was speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service about his role, which has coincided with the Covid pandemic.
He was promoted to his current position in late 2019 and began working on Covid-19 preparations as the virus spread from Asia to Europe. He only officially started the job in March, 2020, and was pitched into a full-blown crisis. Understandably, coronavirus has dominated his working week.
Dr Reid said the health board had carried out a pandemic exercise in 2019, which gave it the basis of a plan to work on. There was plenty to occupy his mind, such as how quickly was the virus going to reach Swansea Bay and how bad would it be.
"The early modelling suggested that it would hit us in a very rapid way, and then tail off very rapidly," he said.
"I remember vividly saying this is going to be awful, there is a risk we are not going to manage, but we will get over it - and we will have a nice summer holiday afterwards. Throughout that initial period, the potential to be overwhelmed was what really worried us.
"Swansea Bay had the first Covid case in Wales. That case was transported to London for treatment and made a good recovery."
Asked about the importance of the rapidly commissioned field hospitals at Swansea Bay Studios, off Fabian Way, and Llandarcy Academy of Sport, Llandarcy, he replied: "We had been quite reluctant to go down that route, but in the run-up to Easter we started to see a steady influx of patients who needed intensive care.
"We looked at the models and what capacity we had and came to the conclusion that if the medium-likelihood scenarios came to fruition, we would be struggling with capacity.
"People say now you went to all that effort to build those hospitals, and that they haven't been used in the way intended. But if they had been, we would have been in a very, very difficult position. They were there as an insurance policy. There were two occasions when we were very close to moving patients into them."
It's perhaps easy to forget how grave the situation was early on. Dr Reid said more than half of Covid patients who required intensive care treatment in the first wave didn't make it.
The Llandarcy field hospital was decommissioned in 2020 while the Bay Field Hospital, as it became known, opened as a mass vaccination centre and phlebotomy (blood-testing) facility. Dr Reid said he expected the building to return to its previous use this calendar year.
Asked about the value of clear messaging to the public throughout the last 22 months, he said: "I think being open and honest with the public has been really important. I think in the early days the messaging was quite clear, and I think Welsh Government ministers have really been exemplary, although I know they have come in for a lot of personal and political criticism."
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Dr Reid has found himself in the media spotlight.
"The messaging at a local level has been to amplify those central messages," he said.
"The communications team here have been working flat out, using all media outlets. I'm pretty pleased with how we have done that."
Trust in authority has been a major factor in how people respond to requests to comply with restrictions on their freedom.
Dr Reid said he felt politicians in Wales had done a good job in listening to experts and taking a consistent approach in protecting people's health.
"I think history will judge the Welsh Government very favourably in how they have responded," he said.
"We see counter-arguments often by commercial and business interests. I understand why they feel the need to state their case, but I have got limited sympathy. The security of the population is more important."
That's not to say Dr Reid thought everything has gone brilliantly.
He felt last autumn's fire-break lockdown in Wales should have been four weeks not two, that support for people told to self-isolate was under-estimated, and that on a wider level borders "were not controlled in any meaningful way" due to political reluctance.
Prompted about whether more care homes deaths in Wales could have been avoided, Dr Reid replied: "We did move patients into care homes. Did we seed Covid in care homes? It would be naive of me to say no infected people went from hospital to care homes. Other studies suggest there was equal infection from staff and visitors. I think this is something which requires examination as part of an inquiry."
On vaccinations, Dr Reid said he was surprised how quickly they were developed, although he said vaccine manufacturers using mRNA technology were confident from the outset in their ability to create immunity.
He said Swansea Bay health board chiefs were notified in October, 2020, to get ready at short notice to start delivering jabs, but that vaccines only arrived in large volume in January, 2021.
"I remained quite anxious about vaccines as an exit strategy," said the 55-year-old. "Maybe I couldn't step back and see the bigger picture. It was early summer (2021) when I thought actually these may be turning the tide."
Asked if he was surprised by the push-back among a minority to vaccinations, he said: "I have been involved in vaccination programmes for a long time. There's always a very vocal minority. I think Covid has given them a larger platform than they normally have.
"I'm disappointed by the stance taken by 'anti-vaxxers' rather than surprised. These people's views are not open to change. But the most sinister aspect is that it causes people who are more open to having their mind changed to be less likely to have the vaccine. It's that impact that frustrates me."
Looking ahead, Dr Reid said he hoped we would have "a fairly normal summer" and that Covid, for now at least, was evolving "the way these viruses do" - namely more infectious but less severe.
"We may see two or three more waves of infection but I think they will be less significant," he said.
The married father-of-two had worked in New Zealand for some time before he returned to the UK, and said the impact of years of UK Government cutbacks was "quite a shock to me".
He said Covid had brought out the best of humanity, but also reminded people of the wider factors which tied in with his public health brief.
"It highlighted many structural problems in the world - how the poorest pay the heaviest prices, and richer countries sequester resources," he said.
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