Health has traditionally been perceived as a matter of personal luck or fortune. However, since the rise of social epidemiology in the 1990s and the work of the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health in the early 2000s, perspectives have significantly changed. All conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, including the healthcare system,” influence health. Accordingly, all public policies that shape these conditions should be directed toward improving health—an approach known as “Health in All Policies.”
While the essence of the social determinants of health is that “there is no biological process that occurs without interaction with the social environment, as humans are both social and biological beings”, social sciences must also pay attention to these biologically manifested processes. Beyond simply stating that social factors influence disease and health, we must investigate the processes within the human body through which health and disease are produced.
To this end, our department focuses on public health, encompassing the full cycle of intervention from health promotion and prevention to treatment and rehabilitation. We provide problem-solving public health education and research that can propose policy alternatives across various sectors, including social policy, statistics/epidemiology, healthcare policy, science and technology policy, and nutrition and environmental policy. This approach is defined as problem-solving-oriented public health research and education. Through this, we aim to develop practical solutions for improving public health. We strive to cultivate globally competitive, interdisciplinary professionals capable of carrying out these goals.