The Drexel University School of Public Health recently announced that Sandra Bloom, MD, will join the area’s only school of public health as a professor of health management and policy. Dr. Bloom is a board certified psychiatrist who is internationally known for her work on the impact of traumatic experiences on individuals, families, organizations, and cultures.
Dr. Bloom will play a key role in the development of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, contributing to the training and research missions of the Center. She will also serve as a faculty member at the school’s DrPH program in Health Policy and Social Justice.
Dr. Bloom is a graduate of Temple University School of Medicine, and recipient of the 2005 Temple University School of Medicine Alumni Achievement Award.
Dr. Bloom developed the Sanctuary Model®, a trauma-informed method for creating an organizational culture within which healing from psychological and social traumatic experience can be addressed. Her first book, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the Evolution of Sane Societies, tells the story of the creation of one of the nation’s first inpatient programs for the treatment of adults who were abused as children. She also co-authored Bearing Witness: Violence and Collective Responsibility.
In addition to these two books, Dr. Bloom has edited another book on violence, authored fifteen chapters and more than thirty journal articles. A forthcoming book focuses on the impact of organizational stress on social service and mental health environments and the Sanctuary Model® as an antidote to recurrent stress and systemic dysfunction.
The Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice focuses on trauma as a public health issue and provides a program of healing for victims of violence. A collaboration between Drexel University’s School of Public Health and College of Medicine, the Center is designed to help provide the social and support services for patients who were treated for trauma, such as intentional injury, and are being released from the hospital. Creating a treatment program called "Healing Hurt People," staff at the Center will follow a trauma-informed approach to treating those impacted by violence.