Public Health Sciences Reorganization

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

On July 1, 2024, the Department of Public Health Sciences was reorganized into two new thriving departments: 

·        Epidemiology and Community Health

·        Health Management and Policy

This move comes as the College of Health and Human Services positions itself to become North Carolina’s second accredited School of Public Health.  Consequently, the locus of CEPH-accreditation that was focused within the Department of Public Health Science’s academic and professional public health programs will shift to the college.

You can learn more about the College’s plans for becoming a School of Public Health HERE, but expect our interdisciplinarity efforts to protect, promote, prevent, health to become deeper and more visible.  The first major step in this direction is our Master of Public Health (MPH) program offering concentrations across several departments -as detailed below.

Public Health @ UNC Charlotte

As a CEPH Accredited School of Public Health, the entire college, and not just the public health focused programs, are part of our unit of accreditation.  This elevation from accredited program to school means we characterize all of our college’s offerings into one of three categories, with each category having different criteria and expectations for the breadth and depth of public health content required for the degree:

• Professional Public Health programs
  • MPH
  • BSPH
• Academic Public Health programs
  • PhD, Epidemiology
  • PhD, Public Health Sciences
• All Other Academic and Professional programs
  • All other degree programs offered by the college not listed above
  • Minors, certificates, and other non-degree programs

For the previously CEPH-accredited programs in the Department of Public Health Sciences, little is changing except the departmental homes described above.  The college’s other programs (i.e., those in Nursing; Social Work; and Applied Physiology, Health, and Clinical Sciences, as well as the new Health Management and Policy) however, will be incorporating foundational public health knowledge into their curricula.  The college is leveraging this opportunity to enrich knowledge and understanding of all the college’s disciplines and to build a better foundation for interprofessional education and practice.  Other less obvious changes will be happening at the college level as accreditation reporting shifts from the public health programs to the entire college.

An interdepartmental MPH

One substantive change, however, is in the organization of the MPH program.  The Department of Epidemiology and Community Health will house the MPH core and two of its concentrations.  Additional concentrations will be housed in other college units.  The Department of Epidemiology and Community Health will administer the MPH program’s faculty governance, but it will be shared among the participating units.  Core program governance will be through an interdepartmental faculty committee, with a subcommittee for each concentration within its home academic unit. 

MPH Concentrations and their academic homes

Applied Physiology, Health and Clinical Sciences

• Concentration in Physical Activity and Nutrition (PANU)

Epidemiology and Community Health

• MPH core (interdepartmental governance)
• Concentration in Epidemiology
• Concentration in Community Health

Health Management and Policy

• Concentration in Health Policy

Nursing

• None at present

Social Work

• None at present

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