About NCEAS
We’re creating a community for medical educators, practitioners, students, and researchers to create better health outcomes.
We study and share ways to prepare healthcare providers to address the social, cultural, economic, and other factors exert that powerful influences on health, and create disparities along racial, ethnic, and class lines. What are social determinants of health?
- Income, wealth, and social status
- Environmental exposures and our physical environment
- Education and literacy
- Personal health behaviors (e.g., exercise, diet, smoking, substance use)
- Social networks and social supports
- Social stressors (e.g., discrimination, social isolation)
- Access to care by clinicians and healthcare systems/ health insurance
We hope you’ll join our conversation, and impart it to your students, peers, and community. We can bridge this gap, and work to create better health outcomes for everyone. More about us
Resource Collections
A Shared Library for Educators, Practitioners and Activists
Educational Collection
Teaching and assessment materials, videos and more to prepare learners to incorporate social determinants into all aspects of care delivery. Explore the collection
Social Determinants Resources
A collection of information, tools, publications and organizations exploring the variety of social factors that impact a person’s health and how we can overcome those challenges. View SDOH resources
NCEAS Research
At NCEAS, we’re working on original research that seeks to improve our understanding of how to address social determinants in training and practice. View our research
“If poverty were an illness, it would be as big a determinant of whether people live or die as cancer or heart disease. And in the United States, right now adults living on the poorest end of the spectrum will die 10 to 14 years earlier than adults who are the wealthiest. “
Stephen D Persell, MD, MPH
Associate Professor of Medicine, Northwestern University
Featured Resources
Explore The Conversation About Social Determinants
Creating better health in every community means understanding root causes. Our resources start that conversation.
Population Health Curriculum
The Robert Graham Center, with funding from HRSA and in collaboration with the American Board of Family Medicine has developed a curriculum in population health with a strong emphasis on use of geocoding to improve care of individuals and populations, intended for trainees in Family Medicine and nurse practitioner programs
Beyond Men, Women, or Both: A Comprehensive, LGBTQ-Inclusive, Implicit-Bias-Aware, Standardized-Patient-Based Sexual History Taking Curriculum
This curriculum, from MedEd Portal, provides preclinical learners with an approach to taking comprehensive, inclusive sexual histories from patients of all gender identities and sexual orientations.
NowPow
This tool connects providers with community resources to help patients address their chronic health and unmet social needs.
Featured Project
Outcomes of the Education-Centered Medical Home
A novel, team-based, four-year longitudinal primary care clerkship focused on preparing medical students to best understand healthcare disparities in the communities where they serve.
Recent Posts
Latest Updates from the Community Hub
Expanding Diversity: Transgender Actors and Their Role in Undergraduate Medical Curriculum
Presented on March 13, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBDOObbpPEw&feature=youtu.be During this webinar we discussed our journey towards diversifying our standardized patient (SP) pool to reflect the patient population that our learners engage with in the Chicago...
February 2019 NCEAS Newsletter
In this issue... Join us for our First Annual Conference on May 7, 2019 | Chicago, IL February's Blog Post: Expert Consensus on Teaching SDOH Resource of the Month, "Using TED Talks to Teach Social Determinants of Health" What's the latest? News, Conferences & Events...
Expert Consensus on Teaching Social Determinants of Health
The concept that social factors impact health can be found in the epidemiologist Rudolf Virchow’s writings from the 19th century, but I didn’t know any of this when I was a medical student studying in Chicago during the 1980’s. During this time, massive, public...
Fellow AU-PCTE Grant Awardees
The AU-PCTE is a cooperative agreement between HRSA and selected units, each focusing on a specific aspect of education in primary care. Northwestern, with its focus on the social determinants of health, is one of six academic units, the other five, include:
Harvard Medical School
Focus: Oral health integration in primary care
Meharry Medical College
Focus: Training for the needs of vulnerable populations
University of California at Davis, School of Medicine
Focus: Health workforce diversity
University of Pennsylvania
Focus: Behavioral health integration in primary care
University of Washington
Focus: Training for rural health practice