Public Health (Health Economics)

This stream provides a foundation for the understanding of health economics as applied in the wider context of health services research. It therefore brings together core teaching on economics as applied to health and health care, but also exposes the student to the wider related academic disciplines of importance in understanding the interaction of economics and global health, such as epidemiology, public health and policy analysis. The stream is aimed at anyone - with or without any previous training in economics - who is interested in working as a health economist in an academic or professional capacity across high-, middle- and low-income countries.

Objectives

By the end of this stream students should be able to demonstrate ability to apply knowledge of the core disciplines of public health, consisting of statistics; epidemiology; health economics; and social research, to real health problems. In addition, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate advanced knowledge and understanding of the principles and methods of economic evaluation
• Demonstrate advanced knowledge of health economic methods applied to health policy or decision analysis
• Identify, assess and critically synthesise relevant evidence from health economic research literature
• Select and apply appropriate, ethical and feasible study designs to answer questions in health care and health economic research
• Show competence, both written and verbal, in communicating research evidence.

Programme specifications - showing which of the various elements of the Course support and achieve each of these specific Objectives.

Term 1

Students take a total of six modules as follows:

Compulsory Modules: students intending to follow this stream must take Health Services, in addition to the Public Health common core: Basic Statistics for Public Health & Policy; Basic Epidemiology; Introduction to Health Economics; and Principles of Social Research, plus one of the following:

Recommended modules: Issues in Public Health; Health Promotion Theory, Environment, Health & Sustainable Development; or Health Policy, Process & Power. In addition students may attend the following non-assessed modules: Introduction to Computing, and the Public Health Lecture Series.

Terms 2 and 3

Students take a total of six modules, one from each timetable slot. Where only one module is shown this is Compulsory.

C1: Health Care Evaluation.

C2: Economic Analysis for Health Policy; Health Impact & Decision Analysis.

D1: Economic Evaluation.

D2: Reviewing the Literature.

E1: Modelling and the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases; Proposal Development.

E2: Analytical Models for Decision Making; Health Systems.

Please see the MSc Public Health overview page for further details.