Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• 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 756: Analytical Methods for Pharmaceutical Systems Assessment
  This course aims to develop skills essential to assessing and evaluating pharmaceutical policy and the performance of pharmaceutical programs. Students will learn to develop a pharmaceutical country profile, analyze medicine prices and availability, apply technical guidelines, and use other assessment tools and methods in the pharmaceutical sector. Students will also develop skills to undertake a sampling exercise, use qualitative methods, and review and write technical reports. Students will use instruments which are already developed with a focus on implementation issues, analysis of data collected and awareness of strength and limitation of each method applied. The course will introduce students to the many resources which exist to help understand pharmaceutical sectors, and prepare them to work in a national or sub national pharmaceutical system.
• 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 762: Essentials of Economics and Finance for Global 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.
• SPH IH 770: Poverty, Health, and Development
  Poverty, Health and Development is an elective course for MPH students in Global Health and a core course for graduate students in the Global Development Policy Program at BU. The goal of this course is for students to explore the relationships between poverty, health, and development in low-income countries. While not primarily a methods course, 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 Health Programs
  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.
• SPH IH 777: Global 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 global 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 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 800: Clinical development of a new medicinal: A case study about licensing a new vaccine for the developing world
  Vaccines are arguably our most potent public health tools. The clinical development of a new vaccine is a massive undertaking, spanning many years, and typically costing hundreds of millions of dollars -- yet the process by which new vaccines are developed, tested, licensed, and used is poorly understood. In this course, students will participate in an extended simulation of the clinical development of a new vaccine. Students will design a Phase I through Phase III clinical development program; at each step, decisions the students take will influence future events, making the course highly iterative and flexible. The course is taught by an infectious disease specialist who recently led a clinical development team at Novartis Vaccines that led to licensure of a new meningococcal vaccine in over 33 countries. This course requires a substantial amount of time working in groups outside of the scheduled class time.
• SPH IH 804: mHealth
  Located at the nexus of technology, informatics and public health, mHealth (defined as medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices, such as mobile phones, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices) is rapidly emerging from its pilot stage to become an important component of public health programs. In this course, you will learn how to design, develop, implement and evaluate a mHealth program. You will learn the basic terminology of mHealth programs, how to develop, design and evaluate a mHealth intervention as well as learn the current state of the field and major international mHealth implementers. Using a theoretical base, you will also learn the technical skills of developing an application based on a case study that can be deployed and used on a mobile phone. This course is suited for students who are at least in their second semester and who are familiar or interested in learning more about how mobile technology intersects with the health sector.
• 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 Global 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 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.
• SPH IH 871: Advanced Topics in International Health
  This advanced topics courses addresses a variety of topics pertinent to International Health in greater depth. They may or may not be offered in any given semester. See the print or web-based School of Public Health semester schedule for more information pertaining to the advanced topics course for a specific semester.
• SPH IH 880: Confronting non-communicable diseases in the developing world: the burden, costs and health systems challenges
  A combination of lower fertility rates and changing environmental factors and lifestyles has led to aging populations and epidemics of tobacco addiction, obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancers, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, aggravating the persisting burden of infectious diseases in the developing world. This advanced course aims at providing a thorough understanding of the risk factors, epidemiology, burden, and economic consequences of the most prevalent non-communicable diseases and the fundamental policy considerations regarding intervention strategies for their prevention and control in resource constrained settings. This overall goal will be achieved by marrying economic approaches with those of epidemiology, clinical medicine and public health.
• SPH IH 881: Program Design for Global Reproductive and Perinatal Health
  This course addresses the major reproductive and perinatal health problems facing communities around the world. We will focus on current strategies to address human reproduction, maternal health and the health of newborns. For each problem, we will consider the fundamental causes and possible solutions, including what works, what does not work and what is being tried. Topics will include maternal mortality, gender based violence, abortion, STIs, family planning and health of the newborn.

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