Coursera

Foundations of Public Health Practice: The Public Health Toolkit (Coursera)

Offered by Imperial College London,

The Foundations of Public Health Practice: The Public Health Toolkit builds on public health thinking (introduced in the previous course) and introduces a variety of core public health approaches (the toolkit) to conceptualising problems, conducting analysis and bringing forward recommendations. In this course we cover health needs assessment, evaluation and public health intelligence-approaches.

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What You Will Learn

Use the principles which underpin public health as a discipline in order to articulate public health objectives
Apply appropriate health protection, health improvement and disease prevention interventions in order to improve public health programmes

Course 2 of 4 in the Foundations of Public Health Practice Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1
Welcome to the course and Module 1: Health Needs Assessment
One of the core tools of public health practice is health needs assessment. In this module, you will learn how need is defined, and three key types of needs assessment: health needs assessment, health and wellbeing needs assessment, and healthcare needs assessment.

WEEK 2
Welcome to Module Two: Health Intelligence
In this module, you will learn about the field of public health intelligence: what it is, how it works and why it underpins almost everything that we do in public health practice. You'll hear about the public health intelligence cycle, and tools that we use to identify and contextualise data.

WEEK 3
Welcome to Module Three: Evaluation in Public Health
What is evaluation in public health? This module will introduce you to several key types of evaluation in public health, including outcome evaluation, process evaluation, and formative evaluation. You will also learn how quality is measured in health care. At the end of the module, you will have the opportunity to undertake your own evaluation, in the form of a logframe matrix.

WEEK 4
Welcome to Module 4: Analysis in Public Health
In the final module of this course, you will learn about analysis in public health. Analysis is essentially breaking something down so it can be more easily understood, and in this module, you will learn different techniques for doing this. You will also learn about intelligence briefings, and will end the module by writing your own intelligence briefing.

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