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The mission of the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine is to improve the health, quality of life and well-being of populations, communities and persons through education, research and service in public health and preventive medicine.
The Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine was established in the School of Medicine of St. George’s University in the Fall of 1998 and started offering classes in the Spring of 1999. At that time it was designated as the Department of Public Health and Allied Health Sciences and the intention was that it would have within its purview, in addition to graduate public health programs, fledgling undergraduate programs in areas such as medical technology, Family Nurse Practitioner, and Physician’s Assistant. There appeared to be a measure of tension between the preventive mission of public health and the re-meditative mission of allied health professions and, in any case, only the medical technology program was actually implemented.
Once the medical technology program was transferred to the Department of Pathology/Microbiology, and there remained no operational allied health science areas within the Department, the name of the Department of Public Health and Allied Health Sciences appeared to be a misleading vestige of an earlier arrangement. Additionally, the fact that the overwhelming majority of students pursuing the MPH degree in the Department were either premed graduate students, in the MD/MPH dual degree program, or were already physicians, could not be overlooked. These students presented an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to the faculty of this Department to seek to educate and cultivate in the largest possible proportion of them, a professional commitment to the medical specialty of Preventive Medicine, vis-à-vis more curative specialties.
In the Fall of 2002, the Department was renamed as the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. This name change, in recognizing the Department’s shifting administrative responsibilities, fortuitously provided an opportunity for the refinement of the Department’s mission. Since this refocusing, the Department has become an institutional member of the Latin American and Caribbean Association of Public Health Education (ALAESP), The Royal Institute of Public Health and the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine.
Commencing in the Early Spring Term, 2005 the Department is pleased to announce its MSPH degree option – the academic or research counterpart to the professional MPH degree. This comes as at time when the Department is experiencing a period of tremendous grow, thus this newest addition to the program is necessary as we strive toward fulfilling our mission.