Population & Family Health

We consider the areas of education, research, and service delivery to be highly interdependent. Moreover, we make every effort to integrate a human rights perspective with all of our activities, so that our practice of public health promotes the greater social goals of human well-being, equality, and freedom.

Mission

The Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health (HDPFH) addresses a wide range of challenges to health, focusing on child, adolescent, reproductive, and sexual health, both in settled communities, and in communities that have been displaced as a result of political or environmental emergencies.

We strive to improve health conditions in numerous locations in our Upper Manhattan neighborhood, throughout the nation, and around the world.

View the most current annual report.

History

At the Mailman School of Public Health for nearly four decades, the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health has focused on promoting the health of women, children, adolescents, and families, with special attention to human rights, underserved populations, and creating change.

The Department was founded in 1975 by Dr. Allan Rosenfield, an obstetrician/gynecologist and scholar who devoted his life to making access to family planning a critical public health priority. Called The Center for Population and Family Health for 25 years, the Department was renamed in 2000 as the Harriet and Robert Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, to honor these two extraordinary supporters.

In the early 1970s, Dr. Rosenfield accepted an invitation by the Thai Ministry of Health to help establish Thailand's family planning program (which over years has reduced the number of children per family from 7 to 1.6). There, Dr. Rosenfield deepened his understanding of the connections between families with contraceptive choices, women's improved status, and stronger societies overall. It also forged in Dr. Rosenfield a sense of mission and a set of principles that inspired the founding of the Center and that continue to guide the work of the Department to this day.

In its early years, the Department's primary goal was to conduct applied research and evaluation in the health and social sciences aimed at improving the planning, management and effectiveness of population and family health programs in the context of broader development efforts. It engaged in multiple "operations research" projects in Africa and Asia throughout that period.

Throughout the 1980s, it ran a short course that provided training in the design, management and evaluation of family planning and primary health programs to thousands of professionals working throughout the world. It also began the Law and Policy Program in 1982, which sought to inform government policies concerning access to family planning services, human rights, and women's rights. In 1985, Dr. Rosenfield co-authored a landmark article for The Lancet entitled, "Where is the M in MCH," which highlighted the how the field's emphasis on children was overshadowing the critical issue of maternal health.

At the same time, Dr. Rosenfield was never one to overlook the health concerns of his neighbors. The Department opened three major clinical service programs nearby in upper Manhattan: in 1976, the Family Planning Clinic for young women, followed two years later by the Young Adult Clinic, and in 1985, the Young Men's Clinic. In 1986, the Department embarked upon an especially ambitious expansion of its local outreach. Working in partnership with Columbia's Department of Pediatrics, the Department established comprehensive primary health clinics in public schools in Washington Heights.

Adding more faculty members trained in social sciences, who were connected to the clinics as well as large national databases, the Department was generating important research that led to new understandings of adolescent and young adult sexual and reproductive behavior in the United States.

By 1990, the massive consequences of the HIV/AIDs epidemic were painfully apparent in Africa. With active collaborations in 16 African countries, including a major research center in Rakai, Uganda, the Department was intensely involved in epidemiological and operations research that have contributed to the development of prevention and treatment interventions.

Also during the 90s, the Department conducted extensive collaborations aimed at preventing maternal mortality, which has since evolved into the Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program. Supporting 93 projects in 51 countries, it has reached hundreds of millions of people. Close to home, the Department opened a Head Start center, serving young children and their parents in Washington Heights, and conducting related research.

In 1998, the Department added a significant new dimension to its work through its Program on Forced Migration and Health. Recognizing the urgent health needs of populations displaced due to conflict or natural disasters, and especially of the children and young people forced to fight and to endure both physical and sexual violence, the Program has contributed to technically sound implementation of health-related interventions. For the past decade it has worked to improve the care and protection of all individuals living through crises, but especially young girls and boys. Faculty members in the Program have also refined a number of methodological approaches to, and ethical considerations of, studies of these populations, working in countries that include northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur-Sudan, Aceh, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan.

Over these decades, the Department has learned a great deal about methods and approaches to what it initially termed "operations research" – a precursor to today's "implementation systems science." It began teaching graduate students in 1977. Since then, more than 800 graduates have moved from the Department into the public health workforce.