The Wilkinson Wellness Lab partners with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Community Health & Human Services (CHHS) Program to produce health information for the Birmingham and southeastern community. The CHHS program prepares professionals to improve the quality of life for others through health education, social service programs, and non-profit work. CHHS offers undergraduate degrees and minors and graduate-level degrees and certificates in Community Health, Human Services, and Community Health Promotion. The focus of the CHHS program is to prepare students to address critical social issues in public and community health individual and group settings and among diverse populations using culturally appropriate methodologies. Students demonstrate core competencies through our highly-rated fieldwork opportunities in business, industry, voluntary organizations, and government agencies. To learn more about the UAB CHHS Program, please click here.

Community Health refers to the health status of a defined group of people and the actions and conditions, both private and public (governmental), to promote, protect, and preserve their health. Community Health is a dynamic and evolving discipline that encompasses health education and health promotion. Health educators develop programs and policies directed at reducing risk factors, decreasing acute and chronic disease burden, and promoting health through the adoption of healthy lifestyles. 

Human Services is broadly defined, uniquely approaching the objective of meeting human needs through an interdisciplinary knowledge base, focusing on prevention and remediation of problems, and maintaining a commitment to improving service populations’ overall quality of life. The human services profession promotes improved service delivery systems by addressing the quality of direct services and seeking to improve accessibility, accountability, and coordination among professionals and agencies in service delivery.

Health education specialists, also called health educators, educate people about behaviors that promote health and wellness. Health educators serve their community in a variety of ways, using health-focused strategies to improve the well-being of their community members. Health education specialists work with individuals, families, and communities, as well as public and private organizations to create, implement, oversee, and analyze programs and strategies that promote health and well-being (NCHEC, 2023). Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. It moves beyond a focus on individual behavior towards a wide range of social and environmental interventions (WHO, 2022). Actions to promoting health in communities include securing financing and infrastructure; developing healthy cities and settings; advancing health equity; and improving health literacy.

To learn more about the undergraduate degree and certificate offerings within the UAB CHHS Program, click here: https://www.uab.edu/education/home/undergraduate/chhs.

To learn more about the graduate degree and certificate offerings within the UAB CHHS Program, click here: https://www.uab.edu/education/home/graduate/chhs.