Community Outreach and Education Core

Harvard School Of Public Health, Boston MA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

The Community Outreach and Education Core (COEC) of the HSPH NIEHS Center for Environmental Health (the Harvard-NIEHS Center), sited within the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), provides a community context for the research and integrated health sciences occurring within the Center. THE COEC supports the goal of the Harvard-NIEHS Center to utilize our extensive portfolio of population and patient studies of environmental exposures and their health effects to translate Center research into public health policy and clinical practice. The Harvard-NIEHS Center's theme is "Populations to Pathways" - studying populations illuminates pathways by which environmental exposures cause health effects. These findings in turn serve to improve or develop new population studies of exposures and health effects. The Population to 'Pathways theme, combined with the focus on how environmental exposures and diseases differ based on life stage, provides a rich array of contexts and settings for the COEC's work. In the upcoming grant cycle, the COEC will target its efforts primarily on public health and health care professionals. Given the location of our Center in a school of public health as well as the success of our long-standing Occupational and Environmental Medicine Residency, targeting the public health and health care professionals is congruent with the educational mission of the Harvard School of Public Health. In addition to having a large number of Center members who are physician/researchers, we work in close proximity to nationally recognized hospitals in the Boston and Longwood Medical Area such as Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital. Our premier Children's Hospital, a few doors down, has an Environmental Health Clinic and is the designated Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit (PEHSU) for Region I (New England) in the US. The cross-disciplinary approach of the Center's research lends itself to a multi-faceted approach to outreach. The breadth of our research ranges from large population studies (e.g., NHANES, the American Cancer Society studies, the Normative Aging study, the Six Cities study, and the New Bedford and Chapaevsk cohorts of children and adolescents) to mechanistic cellular research. The framework for Community Outreach and Education incorporates elements of Healthy People 2010 (USDHHS 2000) and the World Health Organization Ottawa Charter of 1986 (WHO 1986). Healthy People 2010 defined 467 benchmarks of health. While useful for "slice-in-time" health status indicators, Healthy People 2010 falls short of giving us a real handle on prevention and intervention activities. The Ottawa Charter of 1986 uses a "settings" approach in which intervention on health status and trends is multi-disciplinary, multifaceted, and holistic. This approach mirrors the multi-disciplinary, integrative approach of the NIEHS Centers to environmental health research. By combining the two models, we have a guidance template for outreach activities.