> Director: Prof. Dr. Rolf Rosenbrock

Public Health is the theory and practice of strategies and measures to reduce morbidity and mortality among groups or populations by reducing stress factors and increasing resources

Public Health analyses and influences the epidemiologically identifiable risk structures behind individual cases of illness together with the causal connections and possibilities for dealing with illness. This includes examining what forms prevention and health care might take and how they can be directed.

Chronic degenerative diseases are a dominant feature of health in wealthy industrialised states. Most of them are either preventable or else need not occur until a more advanced age. But once they have appeared they are as a rule no longer curable, requiring continuous integrated treatment and care involving medical treatment, nursing and social services. The chances of staying healthy and of dealing effectively with disease are unequally distributed in society in a manner analogous with the unequal distribution of power, status, opportunity and knowledge. The unequal distribution of chances to maintain good health is a socially conditioned problem that is currently becoming more serious in most countries.

Currently the need for prevention and health care resulting from the health situation is increasingly at odds with the provision structure of health-care systems. This demonstrates a need to restructure and adapt health-care systems to new problems and circumstances and draws our attention to socially relevant and sociologically challenging fields of social innovation in prevention and care. In this context “prevention” must be understood more broadly than simply reducing illness-related risks. It is also about grasping what the links are between opportunities for social participation and health and addressing these.

In this context the Public Health Research Group investigates the kinds of conditions that are required for various measures and concepts, legal arrangements and institutions, what forms they may take, what qualities they will have and what their effects might be. Its experience and strength lie in the following areas:
• Looking at conditions that enhance the development, implementation and quality assurance of innovations in health policy and conditions that inhibit these
• Studying the desirable and undesirable health and social effects of such innovations.
Currently our work is focused on the following areas

1. > Regulation and steering (coordination > Prof. Dr. Rolf Rosenbrock)
2. > HIV and AIDS (coordination > Dr. Michael T. Wright)
3. > Participatory health research (coordination > Dr. Michael T. Wright)
4. > Age, inequality and health (coordination > Dr. Susanne Kümpers)

The Public Health Research Group at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin is a member of the German Society for Public Health (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Public Health, ¬ DGPH.).