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Fall Institute Course Offerings and Schedule PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY AND MANAGEMENT TRACK 550.608.98 PROBLEM SOLVING IN PUBLIC HEALTH This course serves as an integrated introduction to the field of public health, offering definitions of health and public health, a comparison of the fields of public health and medicine, and an introduction to a broad array of current public health issues. The main focus of the course is to help students develop an effective, coherent approach to solving public health problems. Public health work is rarely conducted in isolation: Students will work in teams to develop their skills in the use of a public health framework for addressing public health challenges—and opportunities. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on a final paper. This paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 305.607.98 PUBLIC HEALTH PRACTICE This course will focus on the areas of knowledge and skills necessary to the administration of health agencies inside and outside of government. Topics to be addressed will include administrative structures, intergovernmental relations, legislation, politics and the public budgetary process with reference to health departments on the federal, state, and local levels. Issues for which public health agencies are responsible, including AIDS, health promotion strategies, primary care, environmental health and immunization programs will also be examined. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on a final essay and class participation. The assignment will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 301.843.98 HEALTH POLICY AND MENTAL HEALTH The course will utilize health services research conceptual frameworks for examining how mental illness is similar and different from medical illness in terms of access to services, quality of care and outcomes of care. Cross-country comparisons will be used to examine similarities and differences in the epidemiology of mental illness, utilization and policy. The objective of the comparative analysis is to identify similarities and differences in health policies, organization and financing of mental health services across countries and examine the rationale for any significant differences in medical and mental health policies. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class participation and a final paper in which the student independently evaluates a policy or health service program in meeting the needs of persons with mental illnesses. The paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 306.842.98 GLOBAL HEALTH LAW: AN INTRODUCTION Global health law refers to the study and practice of international laws (e.g., treaties, agreements, human rights conventions) and domestic legal provisions to respond to health challenges that transcend national boundaries, and may only be addressed through transnational cooperation, action and solutions. Law can be a powerful tool for addressing global health threats in industrialized and developing countries arising from infectious diseases, harmful products, catastrophic events, impoverished populations and other causes. Multifarious laws and policies can facilitate governmental or private sector involvement, authorize specific actions (or inactions), assign responsibilities among international partners and secure essential funding. Laws, however, can also impede global health goals to protect the public’s health. This course will introduce the key elements of law and policy in protecting global health. While topics will vary depending on current events, the course will provide students with a basic knowledge of how law can be used as a tool for positive, global public health reforms. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class participation and a take-home final exam. The assignment will be due within one week after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. Students who have taken or plan to take 306.630.01 for Johns Hopkins academic credit should not register for this course. 410.842.98 MEDIA ADVOCACY Knowing what will improve the health of the public is only half the battle in public health. Being able to implement effective public health policies requires the ability to organize and advocate for those policies. The news media are a key arena for advocacy. This course will broaden students’ understanding of health communication to include the strategic use of the news media to support community organizing to change public health policy. Working from case examples in a number of health policy areas, the course will show how the strategies and tools of media advocacy may be applied to specific public health policy campaigns. The goal of the course is to introduce students to research literature about news media forms and practices; to framing techniques to influence news content and gain access to news channels; and to the relationship between media advocacy and other forms of health communication. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class participation, an in-class group project and a final paper based on that project. The final paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 380.611.98 FUNDAMENTALS OF PROGRAM EVALUATION This course familiarizes students with several different types of program evaluation. Topics to be addressed include needs assessment, formative research, process evaluation, monitoring of outputs and outcomes, impact assessment and cost analysis. Students will gain practical experience in program evaluation through a series of exercises involving the design of a conceptual framework, development of indicators, analysis of computerized service statistics and development of an evaluation plan to measure impact. The course will also introduce experimental, quasi-experimental and non-experimental study designs, and will address the strengths and limitations of each. ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND MANAGEMENT TRACK 140.846.98 TIME SERIES ANALYSIS OF AIR POLLUTION: HOW RISKY IS BREATHING? This course/workshop uses real data to address critical questions in environmental epidemiology and environmental policy. Students graphically explore time series data, build regression models and apply estimation techniques to address scientific questions including: are day-to-day changes in ambient air pollution levels associated with day-to-day changes in the number of deaths (hospitalizations); are the available statistical tools for estimating the health risks of air pollution accounting for all the sources of uncertainty; and is the current air quality standard for particulate matter air pollution adequate to protect the public’s health? At the conclusion of the workshop, students use the course material to investigate whether or not the current ambient air quality standards for fine particulate matter are protecting the public health with an adequate margin of safety. On the second day, a series of exercises using the statistical software R will be completed. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on in-class exercises. This course is available only for a pass/fail grade. 180.853.98 ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITIES The environment is experienced unequally by different social groups, both in terms of the impacts of environmental hazards, such as pollution and risk, and access to environmental resources such as water, green space and food. An increasing body of evidence is accumulating that both documents these inequalities in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world, and provides the basis for claims of injustice in how the environment is distributed among people of different ethnicities, levels of prosperity, ages and genders. Environmental inequalities can interact in various ways with dimensions of both physical and psychosocial health to have significant impacts on well-being and quality of life. This course (1) discusses key concepts, the methods (both quantitative and qualitative) that can be used to understand and research environmental inequalities, (2) critically evaluates evidence from different places at different scales of analysis, and (3) explores a number of in-depth case studies from different environmental and social contexts. Students will have the opportunity to work with primary research materials and debate key problematic questions involved in understanding and addressing environmental inequalities. Students will be encouraged to bring their own experience into the collective understanding that is developed through the course. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated on a final paper. There will be a number of choices available as to the focus that this paper takes. The paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 182.641.98 AIR, WATER AND FOOD TOXICS This course will introduce students to chemical contaminants in ambient air, drinking water and food, and different strategies for controlling and preventing human exposure and adverse health outcomes. The course will explore the strengths and weaknesses of existing management strategies and highlights similarities and differences in American and European policies. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on a final paper. This paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH POLICY TRACK380.604.98 LIFE COURSE PERSPECTIVES ON HEALTH This course provides a conceptual framework with which to explore the interrelationships among biologic, social, environmental and psychological factors and their influence on health outcomes across the life span. The course will introduce and examine the basic principles which guide growth and development and the health of individuals across the life span, from the prenatal period through senescence. The instructors will present methodological, conceptual and substantive issues necessary for understanding and evaluating empirically based information about growth, development and health at different stages of life and from different academic perspectives. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class participation and a written assignment. The assignment will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. 301.852..98 SOCIAL EPIDEMIOLOGY: HEALTH INEQUALITIES AND GEOCODING PROJECT Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology makes it possible to link individual records from surveillance data or cohort studies to rich socioeconomic information about subjects’ neighborhoods of residence, opening up possibilities for studying how socioeconomic disparities and social context contribute to health inequalities. This course provides an introduction to both the theoretical and methodologic aspects of this technique through lectures and numerical examples. We will cover the conceptualization of area-based socioeconomic measures in relation to multiple domains of socioeconomic position and the importance of neighborhood socioeconomic composition and context, with practical application to the choice of socioeconomic measure and geographic level of analysis. Numerical examples will focus on the calculation of relative and absolute measures of health inequality using geocoded data. Finally, we will also discuss how area-based measures can be incorporated into multilevel and spatiotemporal models to yield powerful data graphs and maps of health disparities. Most examples will come from the U.S.-based Public Health Disparities Geocoding Project, but we will also discuss application of these methodologies to data from other countries. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class discussion and a term paper. This paper will be due within one month after the completion of the course, on a date set up in agreement with the instructor. 300.652.98 THE POLITICS OF HEALTH POLICY R. Virchow, one of the founders of public health, once said that “Public Health is a Social Science and Politics is Public Health in its most profound sense.” Yet research into how political and economic forces shape the health of populations is limited. The focus of this course is on the dynamics of these political and economic forces and on the powerful effects they have on health. The course aims to analyze how power—namely class, race and gender power—is reproduced in society, nationally and internationally, and how power affects the health and well-being of populations. The course analyzes the causes of underdevelopment and looks at the reasons for the growth in social inequalities, both worldwide and within nations. Additional issues central to this course include the effect of wealth and income distributions on level of population health; the question of why some countries have national health insurance, others have national health services, and the U.S. has neither; the influences of financial and corporate capital in the health sector; the question of whether political parties make a difference; the finances of political parties; and what is meant by democracy with a look at its meaning for health. These and other topics are discussed in both formal presentations and in Oxford-style debates with active student participation. The course has twice been awarded The Golden Apple, the top award given by students of the Bloomberg School of Public Health to the best course given in the School. Students taking this course for Hopkins academic credit will be evaluated based on class participation and a final paper. The final paper will be due within one month after the conclusion of the course, on a date identified by the instructor. |
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