The Division of Primary Care and Population Health Sciences of the School of Medicine is a world-class centre for research and teaching in primary health care and general practice, epidemiology, public health, biostatistics, community genetics, health services and social sciences.

With the recent emphasis on a primary care-led NHS and disease prevention, health service delivery and clinical teaching in the community, a strong research base in the key scientific disciplines that underpin such community- and population-based strategies is e ssential. The Division of Primary Care and Population Health Sciences has a strong research and development profile while also serving the increasing needs of education and service delivery for Imperial College School of Medicine in the 21st century.

The Division of Primary Care and Population Health Sciences currently includes the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health (St Mary's , Head: Professor Paul Elliott) whose main areas of research include Environmental Epidemiology & Small-Area Health Statistics, Reproductive Epidemiology & Sexual Health, and Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology. Major programmes include the UK government-funded Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), the Department of Health Toxicology Unit, and the International Popualtion Study on Macronutrients and Blood Pressure (INTERMAP), funded by the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The Department has a strong and expanding PhD programme, and is establishing a new research-oriented MSc focusing on epidemiology and biostatistics. The Department is probably the largest user of computer resources in the Imperial College Medical School, with sophisticated hardware set-ups, including private networks and local UNIX systems, to facilitate the analysis of very large databases. The Department also offers a Statistical Consultancy Service to researchers both within and external to Imperial, which can provide help with the design and conduct of clinical trials or surveys and the most appropriate methods of statistical analysis. Currently, the Department has ca 70 staff, and research project grants totalling £5.4 million. New posts have recently have been created in Epidemiology and Statistics to consolidate the Department's success and to enable the highest possible level of competitiveness to be achieved, nationally and internationally.

Accurate assessment of exposures is essential if we are to understand relationships between the environment and human health, and be able to use this knowledge in devising policy and intervention strategies. Exposure assessment, however, poses severe challenges, for it requires the capability not only to take account of spatial variations in the environmental factors of interest and the population of concern, but also to model the complex spatio-temporal processes that characterise these two systems. GIS provide powerful tools in this respect. They allow spatial patterns of pollutants or other risk factors to be modelled (e.g. using spatial interpolation methods), and these to be intersected with population data as a basis for exposure assessment. Nevertheless, much still needs to be learned about how best to apply GIS for effective exposure modelling.

Professor David J Briggs

03-08-2005