The Epidemiology Branch at NIDA Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Yonette Thomas describes the public health arm at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The division at NIDA that I'm in is the Division of Epidemiology Services and Prevention Research, and the name kind of suggests the branches that exist. So the epidemiology branch, which is the branch that I head up, that I'm the Chief of, there's the prevention branch, and there's the services research branch. And ideally those three things come together to provide NIDA with the public health perspective that we are involved in. So we see ourselves as the public health arm of the institute.

We try to understand, "What's the behavior in the population?" Prevalence, incidence, interactions: What does this mean? What's this phenomenon mean? And then our prevention and services experts take that information and say, "Okay so we know this. So if we know this about this group of people, we can then develop interventions to mitigate or use the protections in broader interventions, universal, indicated, the different kinds of interventions." And then services at the same time would say, "Well we know this population. We know from epidemiology that this population is affected in this way and actually don't access care in this way versus that way, so what do we do about it?"

We'll take that and really look more closely at service delivery, access to care, the providers of the service, the organization behind that, some of the economics and cost effectiveness of services.