Dr Valentine has over 20 years of international experience at the World Health Organization (WHO) across multiple public health topics. She currently leads the programme for the multi-country WHO Special Initiative for Action on the Social Determinants of Health for Advancing Equity at WHO, which has started with forming a learning network with 9 countries across 3 regions.

In 2015 she launched the WHO Global Health in All Policies capacity-building programme, which supported workshops in a number of countries in all WHO regions, targeting government civil servants, health policymakers and educators and continued to lead WHO work on social determinants of health equity education and training. Most recently, her work on evidence reviews has focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on health equity through social determinants. Between 2012 and 2017, she also led several WHO projects related to monitoring systems and the social determinants of health indicators. Between 2000 and 2007 she led the team developing the global metrics and survey questionnaires for health systems’ responsiveness and served in the Secretariat of the global Commission on Social Determinants of Health, where she co-led the work stream with policymakers. She has held the positions of Acting Coordinator/Head of the Equitable Health Systems and Policy Unit and of the Equity and Heath Unit.