JISCMail - CRIMINOLOGY Archives

London Medical Sociology Group - Wednesday, 8th May 2013, 6-7pm

Venue: King's College London, Room 1.16, Franklin Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, London SE1 9NH; Nearest tube and rail: Waterloo

Everyone welcome: please forward to anyone you think might be interested in attending.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gerry Stimson
Emeritus Professor, Imperial College London
Visiting Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

From Sociology of Health and Illness to Public Health Social Science - personal reflections on four decades of work on sociology and health.

I would like to take the opportunity of this presentation to reflect on the place and relevance of sociology over the last four decades. Very much a personal biography and a tour though a limited number of methods and tools that I have found useful, I will look at the early development of medical sociology, its broadening into the sociology of health and illness, and from the mid-1980s onwards the increasing relevance of sociology to public health responses (eg regarding HIV/AIDS), mainly in the field of understanding and responding to drugs (both currently illicit and licit) and related problems (eg personal and public harms). A Public Health Social Science draws on a wide range of research methods - and I will argue for rapid and mixed methods approaches to address rapidly unfolding health problems, and for the need to reach hard-to-reach populations. Public Health Social Science builds on understandings of health and risk behaviour, of risk environments and structural influences on the ability of people to lead healthier lives, and of the need for engagement - including with 'affected populations', governments, international organisations, and industry. I will include some observations on the relationship of science and policy - including ideas about evidence-based policy making, policy-based evidence making, and emotion based policy making.

Biography
I started as a medical sociologist in research in 1967 - with a reasonably varied career including at the Institute of Psychiatry, University College Swansea, Goldsmiths' College, and Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School (which was hoovered up into Imperial College). From 1990 to 2004, I was Director of the Centre for Research on Drugs and Health Behaviour and also head of the department of Social Science and Medicine at Imperial. Over the years I gradually turned into a public health social scientist. Realising after about 38 years I needed a change, and that it was time for Imperial College to go its own way, I left academia to run a small international NGO. My main interests as a social scientist and advocate have been in the field of psychoactive substance use. My main aims are to reduce the harms from psychoactive substance use, improve public health through social and health policy and work internationally to reduce harms from drugs, alcohol and tobacco. I was one of the founders of harm reduction and instrumental in the development and evaluation of harm reduction in the UK as a response to HIV/AIDS. My research and advocacy have involved engagement with World Health Organization, UNAIDS, UNODC, World Bank and numerous working groups on issues relating to drugs, hepatitis, HIV infection and AIDS, alcohol and tobacco. In my second retirement, I organise events and conferences on public health, and have become an ardent tobacco harm reductionist.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Compton
Teaching Fellow (Sociology)
Dept. of Nutrition & Dietetics
Kings College London
Franklin Wilkins Building (Room 4.02)
150 Stamford St.
LONDON
SE1 9NH
Tel: 0207-232-0635