Health Policy Training Program

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests continuing support for a pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training program in mental health policy. The training program is a component of the Harvard University Interfaculty Initiative in Health Policy and is administered by the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. The application for continuation support is building on a strong record of education and placing students in high quality research positions. The program continues to have three central aims: 1) To offer pre-doctoral students strong disciplinary based training for application to the broad area of health policy. The disciplinary areas of concentration with the Ph.D. program in health policy are: 1) health economics, b) political analysis, c) decision sciences, d) ethics, e) statistics and evaluation, f) medical sociology, and g) management. 2) To provide trainees with formal and informal experiences that will permit them to incorporate into their research the features of mental illnesses, the institutional context within which mental health services are delivered and the nature of public policy decision making in the mental health arena. 3) To provide post-doctoral fellows with research experiences that augment their disciplinary training (if a social scientist) or clinical training. In particular we aim to match each post-doctoral fellow with research experiences that offer an in depth exposure to mental health care institutions, clinical circumstances, public policy structures and social science research methods so as to round out their research skills based on their disciplinary background. The training program has been strengthened by the addition of important new faculty including Alisa Busch, M.D., Haiden Huskamp, Ph.D., Jack Burke, M.D., and Thomas McGuire, Ph.D. These additions expand our capacity to teach, mentor and integrate students into research. The research opportunities in mental health policy have grown, as have course offerings and the number of faculty mentoring students. The result has been active publication by students and deep involvement in research and policy. Finally, our effort to recruit a more diverse group of trainees has begun to pay off, which has enriched discussions in our program and opened up new research focal points.