Maternal and Child Nutrition module gives students core knowledge about nutrition issues across the life cycle - from pre-conception, through pregnancy and infancy, to childhood and adolescence. We encourage you to think critically about current nutrition recommendations and interventions, and create your own ideas for how to address public health nutrition issues in different contexts. We use a mixture of lectures, interactive discussions, and skills sessions to help to practice interpreting and communicating scientific evidence. By the end of the module you will know the physiological basis for nutrient requirements, the key causes of undernutrition, and be able to compose nutritional advice.

The overall module aim is to outline key issues concerning the diets of mothers, infants, children, and adolescents and evaluate the effectiveness of nutrition interventions to improve maternal and child nutrition.

Intended learning outcomes

Upon successful completion of the module a student will be able to:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of the physiological basis for nutrient requirements during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, early childhood, and adolescence.
2. Assess the dietary needs appropriate to each life stage.
3. Summarise the key causes of low birthweight, low breast milk output, and growth faltering and debate the controversy surrounding specific nutritional interventions to address these problems.
4. Compose appropriate nutritional advice regarding the feeding of mothers, children and adolescents.
5. Design and critically appraise a range of interventions to address current issues in maternal and child nutrition.

Mode of delivery

This module is delivered predominantly face-to-face. Where specific teaching methods (lectures, seminars, discussion groups) are noted in this module specification these will be delivered by predominantly face-to-face sessions. There will be a combination of live and interactive activities (synchronous learning) as well as self-directed study (asynchronous learning).

Assessment

The assessment for this module will be online, and consists of a 2,500 word coursework.

Credits

• CATS: 15
• ECTS: 7.5

Module specification

For full information regarding this module please see the module specification.