This is a guided research conducted and reported by the students. Guidelines for thesis writing are found in the Graduate Studies Handbook.
Issues to be examined include needs assessment, health promotion facilities management, funding of health promotion, resource management, planning, budgeting, and accountability. The course will also equip students with in-depth knowledge in the administration of health promotion programmes. It will adopt both analytical and practical methods to cover the principles of administration and management of health programmes with emphasis on a systems approach for assessing and evaluating operations of government and non-governmental organizations programmes taking into cognizance cultural and political influences. Issues of inequality and distributive principles of health resources and their implications for quality health care, sustainability of health programmes and ethics of social justice will also be explored. Writing of grant proposal will also be covered in this course.
Students will study how to develop theoretically-informed and evidence-based community health initiatives in this course. Students work on developing their own culturally-competent community health initiatives, each of which is targeted at a particular population with a specific health need. It will include programme implementation and impact evaluation concepts, models/designs, methods, indicators, and data collection, analysis and interpretation strategies as use in community and public health initiatives. Students will work together in small groups on chosen community health topics.
Theoretical and practical considerations in health behaviour change are examined in this course. Health behaviour is defined and different kinds of health behaviour identified (e.g. health-seeking behaviour, illness behaviour, health compromising behaviour, and health promoting behaviour). Discussions will cover both volitional and addictive behaviours. General techniques of behaviour change (both passive and active) and their strengths and weaknesses will be examined.
Students are guided to complete their thesis proposal. Students are required to make presentations on their intended topics, and later on their thesis proposals with instruments before a departmental panel and finally the corrected final proposal is presented before they are allowed to go to the field for their data.
The course is an examination of the interrelation between nutrition and health. The course will discuss both macro and micro nutrients, effects of their deficiency or excess, and ways to prevent or correct such problems. Issues will be related to different age groups, occupations, geographic locations. This course will also discuss health diet and food choices and the link between these and health. The role of nutrition and exercise in preventing chronic/Non communicable diseases will be discussed as wells nutrition disorders. Also, it will focus on the use of a socio-ecological framework in examining multiple levels of influence on dietary intake, food choices and related health outcomes; for example, these levels include a variety of environmental settings, such as homes/households, schools, neighborhoods and communities. The course will also address major public policy initiatives related to public health nutrition, exercise, health promotion and disease prevention.
This course examines the health status of various communities. It also focuses on factors that affect the health of such communities. Various systems of community healthcare (PHC, CHPS) and their strengths and weaknesses will be examined. Also exposes students to issues of community mental health, community recreation and fitness, and community methods to controlling substance use and abuse and domestic violence. Furthermore, it looks at how family health influences the general community health. The relationship between community and health environment is examined to describe both positive and negative interactive effects of people and their environment. Specific environmental components such as air, water, land quality, residential and occupational issues and their effects on community health are explored. Again, it addresses approaches to empowering communities for health.
The course examines the major theories of curriculum planning, implementation and evaluation. Also issues on political, economic, philosophical and sociological implication in curriculum development are examined. Practical examination of curricula and curricular issues from pre-school to university level are discussed. The course considers traditional and contemporary methods of instruction. Emphasis is placed on the development of interactive learning strategies. A variety of methods of evaluating student learning are presented.
This course builds on introductory knowledge in epidemiology. This course builds upon the basic principles and methods of epidemiology and introduces additional tools and concepts that are critical to a comprehensive study design. Topics include: risk and association, sampling strategies, interaction, confounding, adjustment, causal inference, validity and reliability and approaches to data analysis. Specifically, this course revises descriptive data collection and analysis in epidemiology. This course guides students to the design, conduct, and interpretation of observational epidemiologic and clinical studies in human populations with a focus on analytic cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies. Comparisons with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) will be made with discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the different study designs for specific epidemiologic and clinical research questions.It covers elementary standardization of crude rates and ratios.
The course aims at identifying current health issues and diseases affecting both pregnant women and children globally. The course will examine the impact of various common health problems at different stages of the life cycle and their functional outcomes in terms of morbidity, mortality, psychological wellbeing, reproduction and growth. Students will also examine epidemiological literature on maternal and childhood diseases in developed and developing countries. Evaluation of various programmes and resources available to combat health and nutritional problems will be conducted. Discussions on the role of various international organizations will be done in the context of socioeconomic development and current political or economic policies and realities.
