Welcome to the Department of Public Health and Primary Care
The department is located at the Trinity College Centre for Health Sciences at the Adelaide and Meath Hospital Dublin, Incorporating the National Children's Hospital (AMNCH).
Our mission is to foster the study and understanding of health issues through teaching, research, advocacy and clinical care, with particular emphasis on health deprivation and chronic disease, and societal health problems such as alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug dependency.
The Department came into being with the establishment of the Chair of Social Medicine in 1952. The establishment of the Chair recognised the contribution of the social environment to people's health or ill-health, and that medical students needed a perspective beyond their traditional hospital oriented training.
Departmental staff form a multi-disciplinary team with public health, general practice, epidemiology, biostatistics, medical ethics and psychology all contributing to our research and teaching agenda.
The department contributes to the 5-year medical undergraduate curriculum with courses in the 1st and 4th years. The 1st year course is the Human Development and Behavioural Science Course, incorporating Medical Ethics. This is an early patient contact course, as part of which students are assigned in pairs to visit families with young babies in the families' own homes.
The People, Practices and Populations course is delivered In the 4th medical year. As part of this course the students are attached to two different general practitioners for a total of four weeks, where they can observe the wide range of ill health presenting in the community setting.
The department incorporates the Small Area Health Research Unit (SAHRU) (www.sahru.tcd.ie) which provides in-house statistical expertise, along with statistical consultancies for external bodies and web based distance learning courses in biostatistics.
The TCD/HSE Specialist Training Programme in General Practice is also part of the department, providing us with a network of training practices which contribute to our teaching and research.