Dr. David Steward:

SIU School of Medicine Office of Community Health and Service

In order to help someone become healthier, it’s helpful to know everything about that person. The same holds true with communities. That’s why SIU School of Medicine in Springfield in 2013 created a new Office of Community Health and Service. Although the medical school has long been involved in serving the community, Dr. David Steward, the associate dean for the department, says the school wants to fine-tune its efforts to have an even greater effect on the area it serves, which includes much of central and southern Illinois.

Steward, who started at SIU School of Medicine in 1975, has a solid résumé with regard to community health. He has studied regional and local cancer trends, as well as researching children’s health and childhood obesity. He is on the SPARC board of directors, serves on two separate boards with the Illinois Department of Public Health, and is part of St. John’s Hospital’s Community Benefits Committee. Asked what community health means, he paraphrases a definition given by the World Health Organization: the state of complete mental, physical and social well-being, and not just the absence of disease.

“There are a lot of other things that go into health,” he said. “Some of it is economics. Some of it is personal behavior. Some of it is education or social structure or systems of support. All those things end up contributing to health. … You can’t separate the socioeconomic status of the community from the physical and mental health of the community.”

Besides helping coordinate service projects, one of Steward’s tasks is to study the 60-plus counties that make up the medical school’s service area and measure morbidity rates, access to health care, environmental issues, availability of nutritious food and other factors. Much of that information can be gleaned from government records, but Steward says sometimes it’s helpful to simply talk to people.

“A lot of the times, people who live in a neighborhood can tell you what the problems are, what causes them stress and makes them feel uncertain or unhappy or gives them a sense of less well-being.”

Steward notes that this type of study has the potential to improve the health of the workforce, lower a person’s medical costs, and create an entire spectrum of other benefits.

“We’re here to help,” he said. “We recognize that there are a lot of people who have terrific expertise and have put in amazing efforts in this area over many years, so our job is not to get in their way. It’s to support what they’re doing, and if we can help with resources, organizing or some other benefit, we’ll do it.”