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October 23-24, 2006
NIH Campus
Natcher Conference Center
Bethesda, Maryland
The conference focuses on three broad areas of action influencing
health disparities: policy, prevention, and
healthcare. It emphasize both basic research
on the behavioral, social, and biomedical pathways giving
rise to disparities in health and applied research on the
development, testing, and delivery of interventions to reduce
disparities in these three action areas. The conference employs
a multi-level analytic framework (i.e., ranging from individuals
to societies). It includes research relevant to a wide range
of population groups (e.g., variation by SES, race, ethnicity,
gender) residing in the United States, while not attempting
to provide detailed analyses of each and every group. Consideration
is given to multiple public health issues and their interactions
(e.g., multiple morbidities rather than single illnesses)
and to risk factors or causal processes common to various
health conditions (e.g., smoking, diet, exercise, access to
health care).
For the purposes of this conference, we are defining these
action areas as:
POLICY: The means employed by governments
and other institutions to influence the function and well-being
of individuals, groups, communities, and society as a whole.
PREVENTION: Interventions at the individual,
group or community level to provide targeted audiences the
knowledge and skills to avert or minimize health risks.
HEALTH CARE: The timely delivery of care
and/or medical services by general or specialty providers
to persons in need for the purpose of diagnosis, assessment,
or treatment in order to improve or protect health status.
The goals of the conference are threefold:
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To highlight and demonstrate the actual and potential
contributions of behavioral and social sciences research
to NIH's mission of reducing disparities in health through
improving knowledge about the processes underlying the
origin and maintenance of health disparities, and through
improved interventions based on this knowledge. |
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To identify areas requiring increased conceptual, empirical,
and methodological development (i.e., a trans-NIH research
agenda in behavioral and social sciences research on health
disparities). |
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To recruit additional researchers to investigating health
disparities and to developing and implementing behavioral
and social interventions to reduce disparities in health. |
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