SGLK13001U Global Health: Policy, Politics and Partners

The course will introduce students to current and emerging global health issues and the hazards and determinants impacting human health and disease, ranging from individual to society. Some of the determinants examined include the changing role of different stakeholders, health policies, political issues, trade agreements, tobacco regulations, economic development, environmental state, epidemiological and climate change, violent conflicts, globalization of health work force, and cultural and social factors at local, national, regional, international and global levels. Issues of governance, particularly international cooperation, the international health architecture, and the role of international NGOs, will also be covered as well as issues of human rights and equity.

The emphasis throughout is on interconnections. Thus, the course will introduce the student to the subject of global disease patterns: the global burden of diseases; the double burden of diseases including the interaction among different diseases; and the transitions and trends in demography and epidemiology and how that changes our approach to health.

Theories and practices concerned with global health policy will be discussed, as will questions of how international policies, trade agreements, and global public goods concepts affect global health.  Medical anthropology and key issues such as equity, the division of resources, and poverty will be discussed. Students will gain knowledge on methods used to search for and evaluate data. They will also be introduced to, and learn to critically evaluate and choose between, a number of data sources which may be used to gather data to analyse global health issues; including building up and accessing local and global databases.

The students will be introduced to the World Health Organisation’s six building blocks to making an efficient health system. The emphasis will not be only on what are the problems and what have been the solutions applied so far, but on identifying the gaps and discussing what could be possible future solutions, given the changing societies.

This part of the course furthermore introduces a health and human rights approach. Human rights are regarded as fundamental to public health work. Human rights abuses can dramatically affect health, health can be dramatically worsened when human rights are ignored, and health and human rights can act synergistically with each other for the improvement of global health. Thus the students will learn about the conceptual foundations of the health and human rights theme and how this framework can be applied in order to better understand and combat health problems in a globalized world including problems of social inequalities in health and inequities in access to health care.