Alice Sardell Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Urban Studies
City University of New York/Queens College
Email: alice.sardell@qc.cuny.edu
Discipline: Political Science
Expertise: Child Health
Investigator Award 
Children's Health Policy: Actors, Issues, and ProcessAward Year: 1998 This project analyzes how the process of policymaking has shaped children's health policy in the U.S. during the last 20 years. Using analytic models derived from political science literature, it examines and compares the origins, history, and fate of seven major proposals to expand child health services or financing. These include Medicaid expansion, children's health insurance, immunization, school-based clinics, definitions of childhood disability, and home visiting. The major research questions are: 1) how has the process of policymaking shaped policy outcomes in child health? and 2) what are the implications for future policy directions? After better understanding the roles of key actors, their interactions, and the broader political and social environment in which they occurred, the investigators will describe conditions that may help assure the success of future efforts to increase access, and recommend effective advocacy strategies. This work adds crucial political and policy process analysis to the current body of information about financing and delivery of child health services.
Background 
Associate professor Alice Sardell, a political scientist, is the center of the Department of Urban Studies' health policy concentration at CUNY/Queens College. She has been actively publishing on health issues for many years. Her book, The United States Experiment in Social Medicine: The Community Health Center Program, 1965-1986, is the definitive history of one of this country's major innovations in urban health care delivery. More recently, Sardell has turned her attention child health policy, physician networks, and new models of health care delivery, and she is actively working on a book on national policy toward child health. Sardell teaches the Department's introductory and advanced courses on health services and health policy, as well as its basic course on urban politics, Power in the City. She has also developed an innovative course sequence on Communities and Health Services, a pilot for larger interdisciplinary Neighborhood Studies Program at the College and a pedagogic model integrating teaching and field work.
- Johnson, K.A., Sardell, A., Richards, B. Federal Immunization Policy and Funding: A History of Responding to Crises. American J of Preventive Medicine, 2000, 19(3 Suppl): 99-112.
- Sardell, A., Johnson, K. The Politics of EPSDT Policy in the 1990s: Policy Entrepreneurs, Political Streams, and Children's Health Benefits. Milbank Quarterly, 1998, 76(2): 175-205.