MODULES
Foundation Year
CORE MODULES
Essential Skills for Higher Education (Mental Wealth)
The module aims to enable you to develop the range of essential skills required to complete your academic studies successfully and to enhance your employment prospects. You will develop your skills in academic reading and writing, gathering and evaluating information, and critical thinking. You will perform various individual and group activities, including presentations on topics relevant to your degree studies, enhancing your social awareness and team work skills as well as core communication skills.
Essential Maths & ICT
This module will provide you with fundamental knowledge and practical skills in basic maths, data presentation, and the IT skills. The development of these essential skills will help you to successfully complete further academic studies and enhance your employment prospects. Topics of study will include working with numbers, practical applied maths, basic statistics, data presentation and applied IT skills training in Microsoft office.
Career & Professional Skills (Mental Wealth)
The module aims to develop your life and professional skills, enhance your employment prospects and progression, as well as the academic and subject specific skills which are required for further study. You will actively seek and engage with various digital platforms (e.g., LinkedIn), University services and external institutions that will offer you opportunities, to explore, evaluate, learn and participate in activities that enhance your professional skills and reflect on how to plan your career. Academic staff in the various degree programmes and career coaches at UEL will advise and support you on professional skills, career prospects and developments.
Introduction to Human Health & Disease
This module uses a selection of different disease states to introduce you to the diverse concepts of health and disease, disease pathology, measurement, distribution and determinants of health and disease. You will use case studies to explore how human health and disease can be defined and posited using medical and biopsychosocial models of health. Principles of epidemiology will be applied to measures of health and disease to describe the distribution of health outcomes and diseases within and across local, national and global populations. This will help you develop an understanding of the role of wider determinants of health in shaping these distributions.
Understanding Clinical Practice
This module explores contemporary values and the professionalism applied in clinical practice. This will enable you to gain an insight and understanding into theories and concepts as well as moral, ethical and legal principles, that underpin professional values and practice. Psychological principles associated with building resilience and self-care will also be explored. You will engage in formal and informal reflection in order to consolidate this learning throughout the module.
Introduction to Health & Health Care Systems
This module addresses the following three fundamental questions using England/ UK as an exemplar and then comparing it with other countries:
How is health care organised? How is health care funded? Who delivers healthcare?
Within this module you will learn about the roles and functions of the Department of Health, Public Health England, the National Health Service (NHS) and identify its partner organisations. You will also explore the wider Health and Social Care system to give you a better understanding of its complexity and the mechanisms by which it is funded.
You will learn about the structure of the NHS, covering strategic and operational aspects, as well as exploring primary, secondary and tertiary levels of care. The people and professions who work within the system are critical to its delivery and you will identify, examine and discuss their roles. In addition, you will review health systems elsewhere in the world noting their similarities and differences.
OPTIONAL MODULES
Optional Short Placement
This module is designed to give you an opportunity to develop professional skills and experience within the workplace. It will also help you to establish a range of professional contacts that have the potential to be useful both for project work and assisting in finding employment after graduation.
Year 1
CORE MODULES
Promoting Health Together
In this module, you will learn how to identify and critically analyse key areas of health promotion theories and models. You will explore debates, ideas and key aspects of health promotion practice and approaches to health promotion. You will investigate communication and evaluation strategies in health promotion. You will use digital media and group work resources for communication and campaigns.
Foundations of Public Health
This module will offer you an introduction to the foundational concepts of Public Health and Health and Well Being. This will include the historical development of the NHS and Public Health. The Public Health Skills and Knowledge Framework was launched as a national framework in 2016 as a guide to the functions and activities undertaken by the Public Health workforce. You will explore the Public Health Skills and Knowledge Framework and how the framework shapes the development and implementation of Public Health interventions in order to address health inequalities across populations. As a result, you will have gained the foundational knowledge needed for developing your career in Public Health.
Professional Development (Mental Wealth)
This module will provide you with the opportunity to identify the skills, competencies and experience required for employment and employability and how employability and industry connections are implemented in the curriculum.
You will begin to recognise the areas for your own personal professional development (including emotional, social, physical, cultural and cognitive intelligences) through taught and workshop activity.
Central to the developmental process is for each student to cultivate their reflective skills through collaboration with other undergraduate students and analysing effective approaches to industry briefs and creative problem solving.
Anthropology of Health
This module encourages you to think beyond your common-sense understandings of the world and beyond the familiar biomedical framework of health and illness. By understanding different cultural approaches and unpacking both insider and outsider viewpoints, you will discover how health means different things to different people and institutions. Taking a life cycle approach, you will explore these various meaning- making processes through the study of experiences common to all humans, such as birth and death. You will become acquainted with theories that help you engage with critically analysis public health and health promotion agendas. A nuanced understanding of social and cultural models of health and illness will enable public health practitioners to design policies and services that can meet communities' expressed needs and address health inequalities.
This will be a participatory class using multiple modes of learning including self-reflection, critical reading and film. Using anthropological methods such as reading ethnographies, using qualitative interviewing and reflective writing, you will be able to develop empathy and cultural competence, essential attributes for working in public health. You will practise these skills by carrying out observation and qualitative interviewing in local communities.
Evidence based Public Health
The module aims to introduce you to the concepts of evidence, causation, research, study designs and the research process in public health. You will learn to search for appropriate reports of research in a range of databases. In this module, you will acquire the skills required to find, select, read and critically analyse research in the context of current knowledge in public health.
Statistics for Public Health
The purpose of this module is to develop your knowledge and understanding of quantitative health data and statistics. On completion of this module, you will be able to interpret health statistics, perform calculations using appropriate software and critically evaluate and interpret published reports of statistical health data.
Year 2
CORE MODULES
Public Health: Policy and Systems
This module will build on what you have learned about the role and function of Public Health at level 4. You will further examine the role of Public Health globally, nationally and locally and gain an appreciation of how these interact.
You will gain an understanding of the wider system of Health and Social Care, the position of Public Health within it and the critical role it plays in the health of the nation. This will be underpinned by robust policy examples both past and present.
The 3 domains of Public Health will offer a platform to investigate how systems and structures support the outcomes Public Health.
Contemporary Public Health challenges
This module will enable you to develop an awareness of current contemporary public health challenges. You will critically examine the emergence of contemporary public health challenges and evaluate the impact of these issues to service users and providers. The module will enable you to consider responses to current health challenges and evaluate relevant evidence surrounding these to further your professional development ensuring inclusive health and wellbeing of the population.
Epidemiology and Population Health
This module will equip you with the skills necessary to understand the purpose, use and collection of public health information (e.g. primary and secondary data sources, routine data). The module will equip you with the ability to apply basic epidemiological principles in the practical situations, and with the skills to access and manipulate data, run analyses, present and interpret the results and report your findings. Your will learn the steps in the surveillance cycle and be introduced to processes involved in the investigation of outbreaks.
Research Methods
This module will enable you to build on your knowledge and skills relating to research evidence and the research process. You will develop a critical approach to the selection of appropriate research processes, methods, and analytical skills to address appropriate research problems. The module will enable you to generate an appropriate research question and align this with the relevant methods of data collection, analysis, synthesis and interpretation, in order to generate a research proposal.
Health Protection and Sustainability
This module will introduce you to one of the three pillars of public health, health protection, and its connection with the global goals of sustainability. Health protection is a term used to describe the activities that are aimed to protect individuals, groups and population from the impact of: infectious diseases, radiation, chemical and environmental hazards. For some of these threats, geographic borders are becoming less relevant and we face issues that were previously resolved or confined to particular parts of the world. Equally more remote areas that were previously protected are now exposed through rapid global movement of populations. Industrialisation and commercial growth bring threats to the environment through pollution and contamination as well as deforestation. As well as national infrastructures for Health Protection, the international community has agreed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda.
By the end of this module, you will understand the components of health protection and the actions which potentially undermine or sustain the environment.
Co-production of Community Health (Mental Wealth)
Looking at community issues locally in the UK as well as globally through development initiatives, you will have the opportunity to develop a deep theoretical and practical knowledge about communities and how to facilitate engagement with, and alongside, them. Starting from the perspective that communities are the experts over their own lives, this module examines power structures that perpetuate powerlessness and as such promotes the use of participatory methods that advance empowerment processes. You will strengthen your communication skills, working to help people identify and express their health needs. Furthermore, you will learn how to apply this knowledge to inform community engagement with the aim of reducing health inequalities.
Year 3
CORE MODULES
Intro to Health Economics and Finance
Health economics and health finance are key concepts in public health, which when implemented can have an important influence on the quality and effectiveness of public health interventions. The opposite is also true- well designed and appropriate public health intervention can generate durable economic and financial benefits, and improve sustainability. In this module, you will learn about the key concepts in health economics and how they apply to a range of public health and resource allocation policies, processes and decisions. In addition, you will appreciate the fundamental principles of public health finance and health care finance, and their impact on efficient and fair financial flows.
Applied Public Health
This module will aim to prepare you for work in public health by reviewing current policies and practices in the profession. You will view real and practical examples of existing public health work. You will carry out work in the community with professionals engage in promoting public health. As a result you will gain knowledge and experience of public health needs and outcomes in local communities.
Leadership and Professional Practice (Mental Wealth)
The aim of this module is to enable you to build your knowledge of leadership and change management, as well as team and partnership working, within the context of professional public health practice. Self-management and personal leadership skills are important aspects of this module and you will examine and develop these as a precursor to exploring your role in leading and managing others.
All health services are expected to demonstrate continuous quality improvement and so staff must be cognizant and capable of managing the changes that drive improvement. You will therefore explore the impact of change from personal, professional and service perspectives to equip you for professional practice.
Public Health Ethics and Law
In this module, you will explore the terrain of public health ethics and registration in the UK. Public Health ethics has developed considerable over the past 20 years and is now a fundamental element of Public Health professionalism and practice.
In this module, you will explore key ethical concepts related to Public Health and explores the relationship between ethics for public health, in public health and current UK legislation. During the course of the module, you will develop a reflective diary, and at the end of the module, you will write an essay, both activities will demonstrate your understanding of public health ethics and form evidence that can be used in your CPPD portfolio.
Dissertation
In this module you will learn how to lead and manage your own research project on a health-related, discipline-relevant topic of your particular interest, and write a report on the findings. You will also learn how to apply key project management skill for the timely completion of your project, and how to analyse the contributions that an area of research makes to the existing knowledge base.
