August 2, 2007
A conversation with Jeffrey Harris
Dr. Jeffrey Harris, professor of health services in the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine, joined the faculty here in 2001 after working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Earlier this year, Harris was appointed director of the UW Health Promotion Research Center (HPRC), one of the CDC’s 33 prevention research centers around the nation. The UW center is aimed at preventing disease and illness through enhancing healthy behaviors, with a special focus on improving health in older adults. Harris sat down with University Week recently to talk about his background and his ideas for the future of the UW Health Promotion Research Center.
Q: How did you get into the field of health promotion research?
A: When I was a third-year student in medical school, I went to Guatemala and was helping take care of kids who were dying of measles and malnutrition. This is when a measles vaccine was available, and we were seeing one death a week. These cases were very rare in the United States. I had not thought of myself as a prevention person before then.
I did my internal medicine residency and then joined the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service. I was in the disease detection program, and a public health leadership program. I worked in international health for quite some time, and in the course of doing that, I went back and got my master’s in public health. I woke up to the state of health and health care in the United States, and got very interested in chronic disease, tobacco use, exercise, healthy eating, and cancer screening.
Q: How did you shift into the area of preventing or alleviating chronic disease?
A: I was working at the CDC, and provided oversight for the prevention research centers. I came to the center here in the Northwest and learned about an exercise program they had developed for older adults. This program was able to slow the rate of decline in health that occurs as people grow older. I was just very excited about this research that was in the real world, and really touching people’s lives. I also saw a program with women going door to door to promote breast cancer screening in the Hispanic community, and a program in the southern U.S. to promote prenatal care for low-income women working in textile factories. The common denominator is that all of these programs are working with real people who have real needs.
Q: You have lived in many places in the United States and the rest of the world. What’s your favorite place to live?
A: There’s no question — I love Seattle. I wake up every day and say I’m lucky to live here. It’s a good place to do research, too, with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Group Health Cooperative, the VA Puget Sound. The UW is the place for academic work in town, helping bring together all of those entities.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish in your role as director of the HPRC?
A: One of the things I have loved about this place is that Jim LoGerfo, the previous director, has been committed to doing things so that they live on. We’re a pretty small operation, so we may start something, but we have to move on to another project after a period of time. So we almost always do things with partners, like community organizations or businesses, because if we bring them along, then hopefully those projects can continue. That exercise program, for example, is still going and has doubled in size in the U.S. in the past year. It’s now in 18 states, and in China.
One thing we’re doing is getting coverage or support for health interventions that we know work well. Many employers don’t pay for those things, even though they would really help and could save employers money. Doing that sort of work, where you’re working with partners, the project is set in the real world, and it’s not just for a journal article — that’s the kind of work I like to do.
We’re also working on expanding people’s concept of “healthy aging” to include things that you do before you get to 60 or 65 years old. There’s lots of damage that can be done before you turn 65, so it’s important to think of healthy aging when you’re 45 or 50 years old.
One major initiative that we’re working on is the Health Marketing Center. Marketing means “advertising” to some people, but it’s really the five Ps: promotion, price, place, getting the product right, and packaging it. So we’re trying to build employer partnerships where we go to them, and the health product is business-centered, with good economic factors, and it’s packaged just right for the employees. We’re very excited about this project.
