Departmental Vision
There is a growing recognition that the health of populations and the determinants of patient outcomes depend not only on the technical aspects of treatment but also on the social and structural arrangements of the health care system as a whole. United States healthcare indicators are below that of other western industrialized nations. The US has higher infant mortality rates than most developed countries and all of Europe. Integration of public health considerations (e.g., primary and secondary illness prevention measures and application of the social and behavioral aspects of health to detect and treat disease), into the practice of medicine and into the everyday lives of Americans is needed to improve health. The development of social, behavioral and health services capacities can contribute to improving the overall health of individuals and populations.
The VCU Department of Social and Behavioral Health, founded in 2006, provides an academic home for social and behavioral scientists whose expertise is vital to the creation of community-based initiatives, to enable intervention research and to provide theoretical expertise in understanding the social, cultural and psychological processes that affect health behavior and promote positive behavioral changes.
The department’s research is focused on patient-and community-centered efforts that seek to prevent disease formation, improve patient and caregivers’ quality of life, ameliorate ethnic and economic disparities, and help implement systems that improve health outcomes. Programmatic research focuses on defining the parameters of health within populations, the ability and willingness of individuals to access and use the products of medical science, and the distributions and susceptibility of populations to specific diseases and their manifestations as illness. It involves basic and applied research from the perspectives of the relevant public health science disciplines. The Department specializes in qualitative, observational, and multimethod research that is critical to this area.
Faculty in this department work to develop behavioral health and health education interventions to teach communities how to prevent illnesses and enhance health; do basic and applied research on health communication to facilitate better decision making; examine the antecedents of health disparities; develop valid and reliable measurement instruments that underlie the conduct of social and behavioral research. In its broadest aspects, social, behavioral and cultural approaches to the health of populations will enhance healthy behaviors, including practices that will maintain health and those that will encourage early access and use of medical and mental health care, provide a bridge between the community and the academic health sciences center and its research enterprise, and create a patient-centered ethos of care delivery.
