Welcome
The Discipline of Public Health is part of the Medical School of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Flinders University. We aim to promote health and healthy environments in Australia and overseas by advocating for and advancing multi-disciplinary public health research, teaching and practice.
We are committed to local and global action to address the social factors leading to ill health and health inequities. We aim to play our part in drawing the attention of society to the social determinants of health that are known to be among the worst causes of poor health and inequalities between and within countries. The determinants include unemployment, unsafe workplaces, urban slums, globalization and lack of access to health systems.
We are a group of highly committed academic and administrative staff who are justly proud of our award winning program of Graduate Studies in Public Health and Primary Health Care. We began teaching this program in 1989 and since then have regularly reviewed and revised our topics, procedures and processes so that we can provide students with state-of-the-art ideas relevant to the theory and practice of primary health care.
We have experience as practitioners and researchers in a variety of primary health care roles, and have developed our own special interests which are reflected in our topics. We share, however, a vision of health that unites our teaching, research and professional practice. This vision, first articulated in the WHO 'Health For All' statement, emphasises the importance of front line workers who are able to:
- foster, promote and protect health and well-being,
- recognise and reduce disease and disability,
- reduce health inequalities, and
- improve access to services.
Our aim is to equip students with knowledge and skills to enable them to work towards these important goals.
