Sheps, Cecil G.

Cecil G. Sheps (1913–2004), one of the founders of the field now known as health services research, was the Taylor Grandy Distinguished Professor of Social Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), the university's former Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and founding director of UNC-CH's Health Services Research Center (renamed in 1991 as the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research), where he maintained an active presence until his death in 2004.

Sheps spent two different periods of his long career as a member of the UNC-CH faculty. He first came to Chapel Hill in 1947, shortly after having completed his public health training at Yale University. He was born and had grown up in Winnepeg, Canada, and he took his medical degree at the University of Manitoba. At UNC, he was first employed in the Office of Planning for the newly created Division of Health Affairs, and he was on the campus as the School of Medicine expanded to become a 4-year curriculum and the School of Public Health was made a distinct academic unit. He taught basic courses in public health administration, biostatistics, and epidemiology in the latter school until he departed for Boston in 1953 to become director of the Beth Israel Hospital, one of the principal teaching hospitals affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, where he held a faculty position.

In 1958, he left Boston to become professor of Public Health and head of the graduate program in medical care administration at the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. After only 5 years in that position, he was lured back into an administrative position as director of the Beth Israel Hospital in New York and as a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

In 1968, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received one of five major grants from the U.S. Public Health Service to begin a multidisciplinary center for health services research. A search for an initial director of this new center began, and several faculty members suggested that an approach be made to Sheps to return to Chapel Hill to launch this new multidisciplinary center. Sheps and his wife decided to accept separate offers to return to North Carolina, he as director of the Health Services Research Center and as professor of family medicine and she as professor of Biostatistics in the UNC School of Public Health.

Sheps had developed a keen interest in multidisciplinary problem-focused research, especially research focused on the issues of concern to the field of healthcare. He had formed a multidisciplinary unit to carry out this sort of research at Beth Israel in Boston, one of the first hospital-based research institutes of its kind. Several of the investigators he attracted to work in that unit later became the leading figures in the emerging field of health services research, a field he helped to create and name. He was the first chairperson of the initial study section of the U.S. Public Health Service, giving grants to support the work of scholars in what was then called healthcare studies.

...