Courses

The course descriptions below are correct to the best of our knowledge as of August 2011. Instructors reserve the right to update and/or otherwise alter course descriptions as necessary after publication. The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. The Course Rotation Guide lists the expected semester a course will be taught. Paper copies are also available in the BUSPH Registrar’s office. Please refer to the published schedule of classes for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• SPH IH 753: Beyond Reproductive Health: International Women's Health
  While reproductive health problems are major contributors to the burden of disease among women, in this course we will examine a variety of other causes of mortality and morbidity among women in developing countries. We will also investigate the many ways in which social factors affect women?s exposure to health hazards and access to health care. Topics will include occupational health, smoking, mental health, infectious and chronic diseases, and violence. This course is suitable for new MPH students.
• SPH IH 755: Managing Disasters and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
  This course will provide students with a solid introductory understanding of disasters and complex emergencies and introduce practical responses and interventions. By the end of the course, students will be able to describe human and natural emergencies and their main causes, articulate and conduct public health assessments, prioritize needs, and plan immediate and long-term interventions. Class discussions will also focus on analyzing and anticipating the consequences of emergencies.
• SPH IH 757: Fighting Corruption Through Accountability & Transparency
  Corruption and lack of accountability in government are concerns in all countries, but they are especially critical problems in developing and transitioning countries where public resources are already scarce and corruption can cripple growth and development. In international health work, most public health practitioners will encounter corruption at some point and will need to make ethical and management decisions about how to work within corrupt systems and how to prevent corruption from occurring. This course is designed to introduce participants to the problem of corruption and provide them with skills for assessing vulnerabilities to corruption in the health sector. Topics covered include corruption risks in drug procurement and supply, medical conflicts of interest, informal payments, and financial corruption. Participants will acquire the confidence, knowledge, and skills needed to become effective advocates for anti-corruption strategies and health system reforms.
• SPH IH 758: Mental Health in Disaster Settings
  War and violent conflict inflict significant mental trauma on survivors: people living in post-conflict settings are exposed to constant stresses in their daily life and are often subjected to violence, sexual assault, imprisonment and torture. The effects may persist for years afterward, leading to substance abuse, depression, social and economic difficulties or suicide. Incidents of genocide, mass murder or starvation are particularly damaging to the human psyche. This course will cover the goals and structure of emergency programs that attend to the mental health needs of survivors of violent conflict, from the point of view of the program manager, but including an overview of the psychology of trauma and of the principle psychotherapeutic techniques used in the field by disaster relief agencies. Students will be introduced to variables affecting vulnerability and resilience including age, gender, culture and role?as relief workers, soldiers, perpetrators, etc. Participants will also learn about emergency interventions with severe stress reactions and preventative care to avert long-term problems, and how to plan for, implement, monitor, and evaluate mental health interventions and psychosocial programs for communities that have suffered collectively.
• SPH IH 762: Essentials of Economics and Finance for International Health
  This course is an introduction to the essential concepts and tools of health economics and financing with application to the particular challenges facing transitional and developing countries. The course does not assume prior training in economics and will provide an introduction to the conceptual underpinnings of health economics, highlighting those concepts that will be most useful in applied policy settings. Case studies will focus on practical application to current international health financing policy problems.
• SPH IH 766: Reproductive & Sexual Health in Disaster Settings
  Of the millions of people displaced by armed conflict around the world, 65-80% are women and children. In recent armed conflicts, women have been the targets of exploitation, rape, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, and other types of gender-based violence. These violent acts have implications on women?s reproductive health. This course will expose students to the issues affecting the reproductive and sexual health of women in conflict and post-conflict situations. The context of recent conflicts and their effects on women?s health will be analyzed. Other topics will include: common reproductive health morbidities in conflict situations, reproductive health assessments, programming, monitoring and evaluations, gender-based violence, and rape as a weapon of war. Specific examples will be drawn from the wars that occurred in former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Southern Sudan, and the ongoing war in Darfur, Western Sudan. This course complements the Managing Disasters and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies course (IH870). Participants in that course are highly encouraged to enroll in this course.
• SPH IH 770: Poverty, Health, and Development
  Poverty, Health and Development is the core International Public Health course for master?s students in the new University-wide Global Development Policy Program. The course also serves as an elective course for students in public health. The goal of this course is for students to explore the relationships between poverty, health, and development in low-income countries. While not a methods course per se, methods in public health, economics, statistics, and quantitative impact evaluation will be introduced and used throughout the course.
• SPH IH 771: Topics in International Health
  This topics courses addresses a variety of topics pertinent to International Health. See the print or web-based School of Public Health semester schedule for more information.
• SPH IH 773: Financial Management for International Health
  Health care managers must be prepared to talk about financial issues, analyze and interpret data, and make decisions using financial information. This course develops competencies in cost analysis, pricing, budgeting, and reading financial reports in international health settings where financial systems are weak and data not easily available. In addition to using principles of differential and full cost analysis, students gain skills in breakeven analysis and calculating mark-ups. Examples are drawn from hospitals, clinics, and revolving drug funds from developing countries. Students who took IH 763 cannot take IH 773 for degree credit.
• SPH IH 777: International Health Culminating Experience Seminar
  This seminar course has two main purposes: first, to enable participants to respond to one another's work, examine issues in the writing process, make improvements from draft to draft, and complete a well-researched, well-argued concentration paper; second, to explore issues in international health that are the focus of their research and emerge with a greater understanding of the questions they raise for policy and practice. Papers go through three drafts, and students will have the opportunity to give and receive feedback in peer review sessions. Background readings and regular participation in class critiques and discussions are required. Students must be working on their culminating experience to be enrolled in the class.
• SPH IH 781: Nutrition and Public Health in Lower Income Countries
  This course introduces students to public health nutrition in the developing world. Topics include 1) the major nutritional challenges facing low-income countries (including macro- and micronutrient deficiencies, HIV and infant feeding, nutrition in emergencies and obesity) 2) nutrition through the life cycle 3) potential causes of poor nutrition including health behavior, societal norms, and economic factors 4) innovative approaches to addressing undernutrition 5) monitoring and evaluation efforts to track changes in nutritional status and feeding behaviors, and 6) policy-level responses to malnutrition, especially among women and children. While some class time is devoted to clinical nutrition, equal emphasis is placed on behavioral and programmatic issues including successful community-based nutrition interventions, national and international responses to under-nutrition and how these can be coordinated. This course also briefly reviews the evidence base for each approach. By the end of this course, students will be able to broadly describe the literature on international nutrition and to use Excel to clean and analyze data on infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices.
• SPH IH 790: Leading Organizations to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals for Health
  Meeting the challenge of the UN Millennium Development Declaration, ?to promote a comprehensive approach and a coordinated strategy, tackling many problems simultaneously across a broad front? will require inspired managers with strong leadership skills. Through collaboration with Management Sciences for Health (MSH), a leading management and health NGO, this course will prepare health managers, consultants, and donors to lead organizations to face priority health challenges and achieve results. Students will learn practical leadership and management skills and apply these skills in the complex conditions of health in the developing world. Students will have opportunities to work in teams to develop leadership practices, values and methods needed to lead and manage groups and organizations. The center piece of the program involves working virtually with an MSH field team in Africa, Asia, or Latin America to assess the current situation related to an MDG goal, develop a leadership challenge in collaboration with the field team, and make action plans to meet the challenge within existing resource constraints. In addition, the course provides opportunities to work with and learn about the work currently being done by Management Sciences for Health.
• SPH IH 792: Capacity, Cost & Need: Balancing the Equation – A Quantitative Exercise in Health Systems Planning and Analysis
  Strong health systems are essential to achieve global health goals. Using health systems planning models, decision makers can evaluate the impact of policy alternatives for medical care service access and delivery, balancing limited financial, human, infrastructure, and material resources. In this course, students work in teams to gain skills in health systems planning through building and manipulating a complex planning model for the fictional country of Lapalia. Topics include measuring and estimating performance measures for capacity, utilization, and productivity; manipulating cost data; scenario analysis; and interpreting data for decisions. The course requires basic knowledge of Excel.
• SPH IH 795: Global AIDS Epidemic: Social & Economic Determinants, Impact, & Responses
  AIDS is one of the most important pandemics and human development challenges of our time. This course explores the determinants and impacts of the AIDS pandemic and examines best practices in prevention, care and treatment and impact mitigation. Students will explore the relationship between human rights, gender and vulnerability to HIV; examine effective multi-sectoral responses; and evaluate the benefits and limitations of major multi- and bi-lateral AIDS initiatives. Students will also examine the major debates in the AIDS field and explore different, at times contradictory, perspectives.
• SPH IH 803: Antimicrobial Resistance: Facing a Future without Effective Medicines?
  The global emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), coupled with a weak ?pipeline? of new antimicrobials means there is a frightening possibility that we and our children will live in a world without effective antimicrobial agents. This course introduces students to the ecology, epidemiology,and health policy aspects of resistance to antimicrobial agents against important bacterial and viral infectious agents, providing a framework for considering the important local, national and international scientific and policy questions. Students will critically analyze appropriate research and programmatic approaches that could be effective in addressing this major public health problem. Specific topics include the basic physiology/ecology and evolutionary biology of AMR; mechanisms of resistance in agents of diseases such as TB, HIV, malaria; epidemiology/behavioral and environmental factors promoting and ameliorating resistance and the ecology of resistance/antimicrobials in the food chain. Students will also explore the clinical and economics impacts of AMR and local, national and international health policies for surveillance, prevention and control.
• SPH IH 805: Controversies in Global Control and Eradication of Infectious Diseases
  This is an advanced level seminar course. It focuses on areas of active controversy regarding past and current eradication/control campaigns. This class will consider the biological, epidemiological, sociological, political, ethical, and programmatic features that allowed the smallpox eradication campaign to succeed. Other diseases that are currently candidates for global eradication campaigns that will be covered in this class include polio, measles, malaria, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, and dracunculiasis. Public health policy decisions ultimately rest on basic and clinical scientific research. This course approaches this topic through a series of focused readings drawn from the primary scientific literature. The goal is to prepare students to better participate in these debates themselves.
• SPH IH 808: Research Proposal Development: A Practical Approach to Team Grant Writing
  The main objective of this course is to equip students to develop a research project in a developing country. The scope of the proposal can include baseline data collection for needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation of an existing program, or identification of predictors associated with health or disease outcomes. Students learn practical skills associated with writing a proposal including creating project objectives, sampling methods, calculating sample-size, developing a work plan and budgeting. Students work in teams throughout the semester to develop the proposal. Proposals from this class have successfully competed for funding.
• SPH IH 811: Applied Research Methods in International Health
  The objective of this course is to teach student teams how to collect and analyze both quantitative and qualitative data to answer study questions. Student teams will conduct a research study with multiple research methods including a cross-sectional survey and their choice from a variety of qualitative methods. The scope of the research questions addressed will be limited to minimal risk research conducted with students on the Boston University Medical Campus in the space of a semester. Each team will design a questionnaire, administer it, and enter and analyze the data using EpiInfo or other statistical software. In conjunction with the cross-sectional survey, each team will also use some form of qualitative method, such as in-depth interviews or focus group discussions (FGD). The student teams will integrate the results of the cross-sectional survey and the qualitative research and present a report with findings and recommendations to their peers and faculty members. Students completing the course will have the skills to be able to collect and analyze data in a wide variety of settings.
• SPH IH 820: Global Issues in Pharmaceutical Policy and Programming
  Pharmaceutical policies are changing rapidly in developing countries. Ensuring access, maintaining quality, and promoting rational drug use are the priorities. This course examines national drug policies, selection issues, medicine pricing and availability, financing, health insurance, donations, and the role of the private sector and approaches to improving drug use. The impact of global treaties and particularly the TRIPS agreement WTO and access to AIDS drugs will be addressed. The course will also examine the role of global and bilateral donor programs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The course will utilize a seminar format and will require substantial reading to prepare for small group discussions and activities.
• SPH IH 854: From Data to Dashboards: Building Excel Skills to Support Health Program Decisions
  In these uncertain times, managers need, more than ever, to make sound decisions based on data. Good spreadsheet models are important tools in this process. Build your Excel "toolbox" by learning and applying robust formulas, graphing and dashboarding techniques, and data analysis in a wide range of real-world case study examples, such as cost and utilization analysis, estimation of revenues and expenses, and performance dashboards to monitor and evaluate performance of health interventions. Students will have the opportunity to build their own models to apply to a health service challenge of their choosing. This course is appropriate for upper level MPH students who have basic excel skills.

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