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The Center for Public Health Practice Most graduate and professional degrees are both housed and focused within the proverbial ivory tower of the University, responding more to disciplinary trends and "academic" questions than to the perspectives and problems of real-world practice. It is the perspective of this Department that public health education, in order to prepare the profession to deal with the crises that the world faces — natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the threat of pandemic influenza, and bioterrorism, to name just a few — cannot and should not isolate itself behind the safe walls of academe. At the University of Cincinnati, as part of its goal of providing an academic base for public health practice in the region, the Department of Public Health Sciences is building a new structure "from the ground floor up" which will ensure mutuality and communication between the worlds of education and practice: The Center for Public Health Practice.. Noble Maseru PhD MPH, Commissioner of Health for the City of Cincinnati, is the Center's first Director. Although the nature of public health problems today is often truly global – an outbreak in central Asia today can become a threatening epidemic worldwide within a very short time – it is also intensely local. Correspondingly, the immediate service area for the department and its MPH degree is a twenty-five county region in the Tri-State area of southwest Ohio, southeastern Indiana, and northern Kentucky. This diverse area encompasses nearly 2.5 million people and includes a variety of rural and urban settings, diverse populations, racial and ethnic groupings, immigrant communities, and other elements which provide challenges to those working to safeguard and improve the public's health.
The Center for Public Health Practice provides a home within the University for those who provide leadership to the region's public health system, including public health commissioners and key health department personnel, as well as leaders of other community health improvement efforts, such as the Center for Closing the Gap, and the Health Improvement Collaborative of Greater Cincinnati. Office members will have the opportunity to earn faculty appointments by providing instruction to MPH students, particularly in the "real world" laboratories which their health departments and community agencies represent for required practicum and capstone experiences. In these latter two courses in particular, students will learn the connection between developing and evaluating community-based data as evidence, applying it to improve the health of a population, and evaluating its impact on the other: in other words, practicing evidence-based public health. In addition to their teaching activities, Center members participate on MPH program admissions, curriculum, faculty, and other guidance committees along with their academic colleagues. As a group, they will meet regularly with the Department Chair and the MPH Program Director to bring their collective expertise to bear on a variety of topics of their own choosing, which might include priority community health problems to be addressed, resources the University can bring to community-based health improvement efforts, efforts to work collectively to solve problems which they could not address separately, and others. |
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