This year, the Chartered Institute's Presidential Award for individual environmental health officer went to a unique woman. As a young environmental health officer in the late 1980s, a case connected with unfit prawns was the catalyst that propelled Julie Barratt on a difficult, but rewarding path towards a career change that now sees her heading up the legal team at Vale of Glamorgan Council, South Wales.

Brought up in Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire, Julie went to an ordinary comprehensive school and studied sciences at "A" level, with a view to embarking on a career in medicine. In truth, this was an aspiration of her father's, rather than her own, and she remembers: "When push finally came to shove I decided that I didn't really want to be a doctor. So I looked at doing something else with my science qualifications, which at the time I thought was fairly restrictive."

That "something else" was to fill her mother with horror: a degree course in environmental health in Northern Ireland. She started the four-year sandwich course at the then Ulster Polytechnic in 1978, with eight other hopeful students. Julie says: "My mother really didn't want me going there - I must admit though that I had a marvellous time, even though it was in the midst of all the troubles." Julie spent her third year working with the Eastern Group Public Health Committee, at Castlereagh Borough Council in Belfast, before graduating in July 1982. Her Environmental Health Officers Registration Board (EHORB) certificate was awarded in October that same year.

For the next twelve months, Julie worked as an EHO for Castlereagh BC doing public health work with a bent towards food, before returning to England and taking up a position with Basildon District Council for two years. While at Basildon, Julie worked mainly on food and health and safety, but felt that progress was extremely slow. In a bid to take on a role which offered more of a challenge, Julie decided to make another move, this time to Torfaen Borough Council in Wales. "I came to Torfaen County BC because they were doing a lot of training", she says. "At the time there were three or four people pushing initiatives like 'Heartbeat Wales' forward, which was a food hygiene and healthy eating scheme. We were very much at the forefront of projects like that". In 1987, just five years after graduation, Julie was presented with the Morley Parry Memorial Award for young environmental health officer of the year.

But despite the challenging and positive work being done at Torfaen, Julie was starting to look to the future. "I had reached the stage where I needed to figure out what I was doing and where I was going in life", she says. Having decided that another move was out of the question, Julie looked to the aspects of environmental health work which she found most inspiring. "I had been doing a lot of litigation - food hygiene prosecutions - and I had enjoyed the preparations", she explains. The crunch came during a case concerning unfit prawns. Clearly still annoyed about the outcome to this day, Julie says: "We were represented by junior Counsel in the case and he made such a hash of it that I suddenly thought 'I can do better than this myself'". She goes on to add: "The case was based on the smell, the colour and the number of bacteria and he just could not understand the significance of what he was being told".

On the bench was a GP, to whom the technical points would have been extremely relevant. But, says Julie: "It was clear that, unless a point was made to the barrister quite forcibly that he should be saying certain things, he was not going to say them in court."The case was lost, and Julie was bitterly disappointed that so much time had gone into producing a good briefing when "it may as well have been thrown out of the window". An unsuccessful complaint to the legal department illuminated the fact that while there were planning and transport specialists available, there was no legal specialist in the field of environmental health that the department could look to.

This strengthened Julie's resolve even further and she embarked on a law degree course at London University, through home study, while continuing her work as an EHO during the day at Torfaen. However, while the course was relatively cheap financially, it was an immense challenge emotionally. Looking back, Julie believes that if she knew then what she knows now, she would never have started out. "There is no teaching. It's not a correspondence course, you just get a syllabus and an exam timetable and a 'see you on the day' sentiment! Basically you teach yourself. It's a hideously difficult course."

With no social life and very little support from Torfaen, but with a determination that somehow got her through, Julie finished the course in an impressively short three years. She recalls that her thoughts at the time were to "just get on with it, or you are 40 before you know it." At the end of all the hard work, Julie was awarded an upper second class degree - exactly what was needed to propel her straight to the Bar. Having left Torfaen on the Friday to start Bar School on the Monday, an 18-month period of unpaid work now beckoned. This was funded by personal savings built from teaching food hygiene at the local college in Torfaen.

However, once qualified as a barrister Julie found that there was not enough environmental health work around to fulfil her ambitions. One of the main reasons that she trained in law in the first place was the lack of specialist legal help for environmental health prosecutions. Now in the position to offer that, as a qualified EHO and barrister, the only chambers that took on environmental health work were planning chambers and the work was limited.

Of this period, Julie says: " I wasn't getting as much environmental health work as I wanted. I was getting some planning work, but I ended up doing matrimonial injunctions and criminal applications, which really wasn't where I wanted to be." In actual fact, Julie was simply working on run-of-the-mill cases that, she says, all newly qualified barristers do. "I had trained too long to bring a specialism to the profession to just kiss it goodbye and become driven in whatever direction chambers is going in", she asserts.

Feeling uneasy about the direction her career was taking once again, Julie took another leap of faith. In March 1995, she was offered a position at Vale of Glamorgan, working in planning and environmental health in preparation for the local planning inquiry. It seemed like a good move at the time, but the following year, when the inquiry was due to start, the plan was aborted. In its place the Unitary Development Plan was fast tracked - and the sole reason for Julie going to work at the council was gone literally overnight.

As a senior officer deeply involved in the planning process, Julie decided not to move again, but to stay and weather the storm. As luck would have it, shortly after these events the council underwent a corporate review which, in effect, fast-tracked Julie's career. She now holds the position of operational manager, legal services.

Of the promotion, Julie modestly says: "I'm at a place you might normally be with 15 to 20 years experience". During her time at the Vale of Glamorgan managing legal services, Julie has endeavoured to build a department that serves the enforcement officer in the way they want to be served, not the other way round. "I think that it has helped, having an insight into how I wanted to be served by the legal department as an EHO", she says. "As an enforcement officer, you know what you want from a legal department. If you contact them and say 'can we do such-and-such?', you want to be told 'yes' or 'no'. You do not want a debate on the finer legal points three weeks later".

Another point that Julie's own experiences have made her acutely aware of, is how little training in legal procedures the majority of EHOs get. "When I left college", she remembers, "if somebody had said to me - 'how do you go about starting a court case?' - I would not have had the first idea about drafting information and issuing summonses". Consequently, Julie offers legal training courses for EHOs through the Chartered Institute's centres and branches in Wales.

Since taking over the legal services division, Julie says that the number of people prosecuted by Vale of Glamorgan have been cranked up. "It is a moot point whether the number of successful prosecutions is a good or a bad measure", she muses. "There is a very potent argument that if you are having to prosecute, then you are not getting the message across. But there is also a counter argument that it doesn't matter how well you get the message across, there are people who will still ignore it." According to Julie, better training has improved the confidence of EHOs at the Vale of Glamorgan: "They know what to expect in court and they can deal with it more effectively. If EHOs look like professionals in court, then the bench is more likely to believe that they are reliable."

An active member of the CIEH, Julie is secretary of the Gwent Branch, she has found that the demand for training is ever expanding. "When we asked the membership what they wanted, the thing they predominantly asked for was training." The courses now provided by Julie include: collecting and collating evidence and presenting it in a way that is suitable for court; witness training; and fixed penalty procedures

A big source of frustration for Julie is the number of qualified people leaving the environmental health profession. She knows of other EHOs, in similar career moves to her own, who have gone on to become solicitors, but unlike her, have failed to return. "These people have a wealth of other experience that, if we could just harness and bring back to the profession, we could gain so much from", she says. "Many councils are setting up directorates with environmental health and regulatory services", she points out, "the Vale of Glamorgan is not alone in this". She clearly believes that the profession should be doing more to stop good people from just walking away.

As for herself, she says: "I'm very happy with my work at the minute because it has been a heady rise really. I'm now in management as well as participating in hands-on law and dealing with environmental health and planning". Any frustration comes from her role as a manager, which is taking her further away from practising law. "That said, I've got a job which is a real challenge, which environmental health alone was ceasing to be."

She is aware that the fact that she was an EHO when her own department was just legal and administration was "neither here nor there". However, now the department is legal and regulatory services, which includes trading standards and environmental health, being an EHO and a lawyer is just about as good as it gets.