The following list of premises represents some of the ideas that are foundational to the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine purpose and aims. The Department’s research and teaching are based on these and related tenets.
Social Roots
Diseases have social roots; attaining health at a population level requires the coordination of health policies with social policies.
Social Inequalities
Inequities based on social class, race, ethnicity, gender, and global relations contribute to inequalities in health conditions and access to care.
Culture
Illness is an experience, often a powerful and a deeply interpersonal experience that expresses and is created out of cultural values and practices.
Medicine as a Moral Practice
Suffering and medical care are moral processes that express and create what is at stake in lived experience.
New Biotechnologies
Changes in medical knowledge and the production of new biotechnologies create new social, cultural, political, and economic realities, resulting in complex ethical challenges.
Globalization
Health and medicine are global enterprises, and globalization—a crucial process of current social change—has an enormous impact on medicine.
Implementation Gap
There is a wide gap between medical knowledge and resources on one hand and the effective delivery of health care on the other.
Global Health Delivery
Research and training in the new field of Global Health Delivery will help to bridge the implementation gap.