Collective Health

The Graduate Program in Collective Health at Unicamp aims to train quality researchers at Master's and Doctoral level. Collective Health is a scientific field that contributes to the study of the health-disease-care process as a social process in various groups and populations, paying attention to their geographical, historical and social distribution, and also to the ways in which each society defines its health demands and organizes itself to meet its needs in this field.

Being an interdisciplinary field par excellence, Collective Health developed from the structuring of three main disciplinary axes: epidemiology, social sciences in health and health planning and management. Reflecting this traditional interdisciplinarity, our program is multi-professional and uses qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches.

Our current areas of concentration: Epidemiology; Health Policy, Planning and Management; and Social Sciences in Health reflect the specificity of the disciplinary axes and provide in-depth and specialized study without losing the thematic connection of the area. To ensure this cohesion of the field as a whole, there is a basic core of subjects common to all areas of concentration, which seeks to ensure basic competence in public health as a whole.

The program has been characterized by a great deal of exchange with national and international health services, agencies and universities. It has attracted researchers from national and Latin American universities and from the Brazilian Unified Health System and its complementary areas. As a result, its activities have been based on productive partnerships with other institutions within UNICAMP's academic sphere, state and federal universities and research institutes, both national and international.

Its target audience is professionals at higher education level who work at the interface with Health Sciences in the area of Collective Health, and its duration is 12 to 24 months for the Master's degree and 24 to 48 months for the Doctorate. The program has implemented affirmative action for admission to and retention on the Master's and Doctorate courses.

We are proud to see this reflected in our graduates: we produced 20% of Brazilian PhDs in Collective Health during the five-year period 2004-2008 and many of these former students now hold highly relevant positions in the Brazilian Unified Health System and in national and foreign public universities, contributing to the development of science in the country and the region.