Maintaining and promoting health is one of the most important challenges facing society. Findings from public health research help quantify health risks and develop evidence-based ways to promote health and prevent disease.
The Faculty of Public Health is rising to this challenge. It sees itself as a Professional School of Public Health, which means that it conducts problem-oriented basic research in particular. It is thus an innovative faculty that does not work as a monodisciplinary research unit, but follows an interdisciplinary and problem-oriented approach. This results from the nature of the object of knowledge "health", which eludes a monodisciplinary approach both in the analysis and in the understanding of necessary interventions. Based on this interdisciplinary culture, the Faculty analyzes and addresses pressing public health challenges. These include, for example, demographic change, which is accompanied by a growing importance of chronic diseases and the need for long-term care, the continuing social inequality of health opportunities nationally and internationally, or the analysis of health effects and implications against the background of the progressive differentiation and diversification of society (e.g. through migration).
These and similar societal problems set the framework for the Faculty's research orientation. The research interest lies on the one hand in the analysis of the physical, psychological and social initial conditions and causes for health and illness in different population groups and on the other hand in the analysis of the resulting consequences for care systems, health policy, health management and health system design. In their analyses, the researchers draw on various theoretical, paradigmatic and methodological approaches from the heterogeneous reference disciplines of public health. Of particular relevance for research at the School of Public Health is the combination of disciplines from the biomedical and the social-behavioral tradition of thought.
The Institute for Nursing Science was founded in 1995 with the aim of promoting the expansion of nursing science and research at the university level. The IPW is an affiliated institute of Bielefeld University and is financially supported by the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia NRW.