Master of Public Health Online: Curriculum

Public health is a multidisciplinary and vast field that seeks to protect, improve, and promote health and well-being among individuals, communities, and populations. Foundations of public health provides an opportunity to explore the profession—including its history, values and ethics, core functions, practice areas and services. This course will prepare you for subsequent courses in the public health curriculum, providing you with a foundational understanding of how public health interacts with population health.

Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health and disease in different human populations and the application of methods to improve disease outcomes. This course will introduce you to studies of the history and basic principles of epidemiology including measures of disease frequency, epidemiologic study design, bias, confounding, screening, and causality. You will also examine common ethical issues in epidemiologic research and practice.

Understanding and interpreting data is a necessary skill for understanding health metrics and making good public health decisions. You will learn statistical methods and principles necessary for understanding, calculating, and interpreting data used in public health and policy evaluation and formation. Topics include descriptive statistics, graphical data summary, sampling, probability and distributions, statistical comparison of groups, correlation, and regression.

Our environment influences our health and well-being in profound ways. In this course you will explore the basic principles, practices, and major issues in environmental health. We will also examine justice issues related to our environment and explore the environmental justice movement. You will investigate strategies for applying and evaluating environmental health and justice principles and strategies to address looming environmental health challenges such as global climate change, managing hazardous waste, etc.

We live in an era when advances in medical technology and treatment rush at us so fast and furiously that it is easy to lose sight of the critical role of our own behavior in our health and longevity. Health behaviors, attitudes, and overall well-being are also influenced by our gender, age, personality, ethnic and cultural background. This course will promote your understanding of, and respect for, the differences among groups of people; it will increase your awareness of the special challenges and problems faced by various groups. Some of the challenges are, of course, beyond our control, but many are not. We will use research evidence to structure our understanding of social and behavioral aspects of health. We will evaluate appropriate outcomes of behavioral modifications related to health and well-being.

Religion has long been known to influence our behavior and spiritual health. Only in the past two decades have we researched and learned that religious participation can impact individual health. The next logical step would be, if religion and spirituality can affect individual health, then it could also affect public health. This course will examine psychological concepts of human behavior, apply these concepts, and thereby understand human behavior in the context of religion, health and public health. We will use the framework of the Biblical nature of humans as our guide through this course. In this course we will ask questions like: Under what conditions does religion promote health, what conditions under which religion can harm well-being, what psychological concepts contribute to spiritual and physical health, how does the biopsychosocial-spiritual aspect of individual health influence public health?

This course provides you with the opportunity to demonstrate advanced understanding of public health and the ability to integrate your learning experience. Using a seminar-based learning approach, we will process and apply our understanding of public health as experienced throughout the curriculum. We will seek to identify and address ethical issues in our respective fields of practice, throughout integrating a Reformed Christian lens to our understanding.

Public health is a professional degree and thus, practical experience is paramount to the MPH program. This course allows you to apply public health skills and knowledge to an agency or field setting. The internship is paired with a professional seminar to provide intentional opportunities for you to connect course content with their practice in the field. You are required to complete at least 130 hours in the field setting along with a weekly course. Prerequisites: All foundational public health courses must be complete prior to enrolling in the practicum course and be in good standing within the public health program.

The world continues to become more interconnected providing opportunities for both the spread of disease but also collective problem solving. This course sets the foundation for understanding how globalization affects population health across the world, introduces how we quantify the global burden of disease, identifies the global actors responsible for setting health policies and their roles, and provides a context for health and human rights. Students will identify key global health issues and needs such as infant and maternal health, infectious diseases, and nutrition as well as determinants of health in these areas.

The development and evaluation of culturally appropriate public health interventions is critical in global public health efforts. Using case studies and examples from across the world, students will be introduced to ways in which interventions succeeded and failed due to the level of engagement with and understanding of local populations. Community-based strategies and frameworks will be discussed and assessed. There will be particular emphasis on how thoughtful public health interventions and evaluations can promote health equity and reduce the global burden of disease. Students will identify challenges to implementing and evaluating programs and policies, and will seek solutions to these challenges.

Political decision-making and leadership heavily influence population health. Students will identify the links between global health governance, policy, and system reform to global health inequalities. Students will evaluate the roles of key global actors and stakeholders in effecting health outcomes. We will identify best practices in implementing health policy management in effective, ethical, and culturally-appropriate ways. Students will gain preliminary experience in several public health administrative skills such as budgeting, grant writing, and effective leadership. Case studies and examples will be utilized to demonstrate how policy and administrative decisions are made and how they influence population health.

This course will provide opportunities for in-depth review and discussions of selected global health issues. The issues will be related to contemporary global health challenges as well as other relevant topics to strengthen or complement the existing topics in the other courses in the masters in public health program. The topics will include consideration of determinants of health associated with these topics/conditions, prevention strategies, and the important factors such as cultural, economic, behavioral, social, environmental, ethical and political factors that must be considered when addressing these global health issues. Collaborative and partnership factors important for promoting global health will also be considered. The topics will be preselected by the instructor and may vary each term. Examples of some of the topics include partnership development including grant writing and seeking funds for global health programs. Other topics include maternal and infant health; emerging infectious diseases; intentional and unintentional injuries including accidents; chronic diseases such as cardiovascular problems, diabetes, cancer and mental illness; selected tropical diseases; and environmental health and sustainability. Teaching strategies will include lectures and discussions, guest speakers, student presentations.

This course focuses on geographic information systems (GIS) and the art and science of mapping for spatial analysis. Map-design techniques and visual communication using GIS vector and raster data forms will be explored, as well as a variety of methods for analyzing spatial relationships. Topics include those of the physical world and landscape, social justice, poverty, and a significant end-of-semester project. This course has a lecture and lab component, and lab work will give practical experience to students using the ArcGIS suite. Students will complete a GIS project tailored to their disciplinary interest and also explore religious faith in professional GIS life.

This course focuses on geographic information systems (GIS) and the art and science of mapping for spatial analysis. Map-design techniques and visual communication using GIS vector and raster data forms will be explored, as well as a variety of methods for analyzing spatial relationships. Topics include those of the physical world and landscape, social justice, poverty, and a significant end-of-semester project. This course has a lecture and lab component, and lab work will give practical experience to students using the ArcGIS suite. Students will complete a GIS project tailored to their disciplinary interest and also explore religious faith in professional GIS life.

The development and evaluation of culturally appropriate public health interventions is critical in global public health efforts. Using case studies and examples from across the world, students will be introduced to ways in which interventions succeeded and failed due to the level of engagement with and understanding of local populations. Community-based strategies and frameworks will be discussed and assessed. There will be particular emphasis on how thoughtful public health interventions and evaluations can promote health equity and reduce the global burden of disease. Students will identify challenges to implementing and evaluating programs and policies, and will seek solutions to these challenges.