Introduction to Public Health

This course is offered at Masters level and is delivered at our Frenchay Campus.

Course content includes:

• Philosophical and theoretical perspectives on health, illness and public health, including epistemological and ontological arguments and social theories of subjectivity/objectivity, induction/deduction, structure, agency, human nature and modernity.
• Philosophical perspectives on community and society: community organisation; group and organisational theory; political ideology (individualism, collectivism, communitarianism, market capitalism, etc).
• Political and ethical values in public health: e.g. beneficence, equity, social justice, altruism, interdependence, social responsibility, harm principle, freedom, risk, etc.
• Contributions of primary academic disciplines to public health, specifically sociology, ecology, psychology, education, political science, economics and biomedicine.
• Historical and geographic trends and developments: evolution of the public health field; rise and prominence of biomedicine; national and international political developments (including WHO); global public health trends.
• Determinants of health and illness: national and international trends; cultural, social, environmental and political contexts; key health drivers.
• Inequalities in health, healthcare, opportunity and social status: social justice; rights and freedoms; local, national and international classification and social stratification (occupation, income, ethnicity, race, culture, religion, generation, age, gender, sexuality, opportunity and ability); political and ethical debates on inequality.

Delivery:

Study time includes 30 hours of contact time delivered through lectures, seminars and on-line activities. These comprise 8 taught 3.5 hour sessions scheduled in semester 1 and supplemented with additional online support. Up to one hour is available for one-to-one tutorial support.

A double session (full day) is scheduled for the first teaching day of the academic year as a formative developmental workshop. Successive weeks are then delivered as half days. Classroom based teaching comprises lectures, workshops and seminars. Technology Enhanced Learning supplements taught sessions with online learning materials such as podcasts and videos. Course support is provided via Blackboard and a blog site.