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Dr Tiziana Leone CON 8.11 and Dr Philipa Mladovsky CON 6.13

This course is compulsory on the MSc in Health and International Development. This course is available on the MSc in Development Management, MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities, MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies, MSc in Political Economy of Late Development, MSc in Social Research Methods and MSc in Urbanisation and Development. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Places will be allocated with priority to ID and joint-degree students.  If there are more ID and joint-degree students than DV458 can accommodate, these places will be allocated randomly.  Non-ID/Joint Degree students will be allocated to spare places by random selection with the preference given first to those degrees where the regulations permit this option

The course provides an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to global health and health system trends in low and middle-income countries. The course examines the main determinants of health issues as they relate to development and their principal consequences, policies and politics to improve health and development; barriers to implementing those policies; and ways of overcoming those barriers. Key topics include the politics of diseases, framing health discourses, universal health coverage, impacts of conflict and climate change on health, pharmaceutical governance and global health metrics. Drawing on disciplines such as political science, health policy, demography, sociology and economics, this course argues for the need to improve global health equity in order to contribute to development. It will equip students with the skills needed to work in and help to improve mainstream global health organisations such as WHO, the World Bank, Gates Foundation and MSF among others. The course promotes equality, social justice and human rights as fundamental approaches to global health.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars in the MT. Seminars will be at or upwards of 45 minutes duration and lectures will be at or above 60 minutes duration.

Student on this course will have a reading week in Week 6.

Students are expected to prepare a seminar presentation and complete a mock exam during MT.

The course is supported by an electronic reading list. There is no single key text but here are some indicative readings:  

• Birn, A. et al, 2017 “Textbook on global health”

• Marmot, M., 2005 “The social determinants of health”

• Shiffman, 2009, “The rise and fall of global health”

• Adams, V. 2016, “Metrics: what counts in global health”

• Marie Paule Kieny, Henk Bekedam, Delanyo Dovlo, James Fitzgerald 2017 “Strengthening health systems for universal health coverage and sustainable development”

• Watts et al 2018 “Countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health

48 hour online take-home exam (100%) in January.

Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.