Laboratory of the Social Determinants of Population Health
The Laboratory was established in 2024 based on two laboratories: the Laboratory of the Social Determinants of Children’s Health (the head of the Laboratory since 2008 is Doctor of Sciences (Medicine) S.V. Hozak) and the Laboratory of Genetic Epidemiology (the head of the Laboratory since 2016 is Candidate of Sciences (Medicine) E.M. Omelchenko).
S.V. Hozak (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6379-7331), Doctor of Sciences (Medicine), is the head of the Laboratory.
Tel.: +38(044)292-06-19 ; e-mail : school_health@meta.ua, s.hozak@health.gov.ua
The main scientific activities:
- studying the processes of public health formation, considering social, genetic, and behavioral determinants of public health;
- studying the lifestyle, life conditions, social, and other factors that form the health conditions of different groups of people;
- physiological and hygienic substantiation of learning workloads for children and development of national educational standards;
- substantiation of regulations for hygienic assessment and expertise of educational curricula, teaching technologies, and textbooks;
- development of new technologies for maintaining the health of children and adolescents during education in educational institutions, which includes the forecast of adaptation and spare capabilities of the body, enhancement of spare capabilities of the body, and influence on risk factors;
- development of criteria for the adaptability assessment of capabilities of the child body to the influence of factors of the educational environment;
- development and introduction of medical and educational criteria, and monitoring methods for assessment of the relevance of existing educational workloads, curricula, and innovative educational technologies, taking into account gender, age, functional, and psycho-physiological characteristics of children and youth;
- identification of potential danger to public health due to social changes in public as a result of emergency humanitarian situations, and the development of prophylactic strategies;
- epidemiology of inherited, inborn, and major multifactor diseases; research on ways to decrease the level of ecologically determined pathology.
The most significant scientific achievements
The researchers of the Laboratory
- developed the criteria for the assessment of the educational reforms in Ukraine;
- established the regularities of adaptation and formation of the health of the students of different age groups in the period of modernization of education in Ukraine under conditions of various forms of teaching and physical education;
- substantiated the criteria for the hygienic support of the vital functions of children with various disorders in the state of health, the students of special boarding schools;
- developed the criteria for the assessment of the educational programs on physical education of the students;
- developed the program “Beautiful Posture of the Child” for the prevention and correction of disorders in the locomotor system of senior preschool and school-age children;
- developed the conceptual approaches to the hygienic principles of physical education of the children at the educational institutions;
- developed the criteria of the learning workload for children and adolescents of 1-11 grades of secondary school;
- developed the criteria levels of health-improving physical activity of children and adolescents for normal life conditions and emergency humanitarian situations, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, as well;
- established the characteristics of adaptation of children and adolescents to the quarantine measures during the period of COVID-19 pandemic;
- developed the computer code for the prediction of children’s health, taking into account the morpho-functional and behavioral determinants;
- developed the conception of the program and service for genetic monitoring in Ukraine, created the methodology of its carrying out; the prophylactic measures system is science-based and introduced in Kyiv Region of Ukraine, which allows to decrease the reproductive related losses in population; the Laboratory specialists also developed the forecast for the reproductive potential of the region population development;
- described the genetic and demographic processes in the populations of large and small cities, analyzed marriage migration in them, and calculated the impact of the genetic and demographic structure of the population on the risk of diseases, which gives the grounds to substantiate the indices, that we could use in the forecasting of biological adaptability of populations, in the assessment of populations’ sensitivity to external impacts, including the anthropogenic pollutants.