John Hopkins Course in Systems Approaches for Public Health
Johns Hopkins University has created an online course, costing less than £50, on Systems Approaches in Public Health through courser starting on 18th September
The course provides an introduction to systems thinking and systems models in public health.
The course information states "Problems in public health and health policy tend to be complex with many actors, institutions and risk factors involved. If an outcome depends on many interacting and adaptive parts and actors the outcome cannot be analyzed or predicted with traditional statistical methods. Systems thinking is a core skill in public health and helps health policymakers build programs and policies that are aware of and prepared for unintended consequences. An important part of systems thinking is the practice to integrate multiple perspectives and synthesize them into a framework or model that can describe and predict the various ways in which a system might react to policy change. Systems thinking and systems models devise strategies to account for real world complexities. This work was coordinated by the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, the World Health Organization, with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Additional support was provided by the Department for International Development (DFID) through a grant (PO5467) to Future Health Systems research consortium. "
This course is one of the first on this topic, and if the discussions which reach the ears of our editorial group are anything to go by, several other institutions are thinking about this.
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