Year 1 2019

Course: ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO PUBLIC HEALTH (MPH 512)

Description: The ‘Anthropological Approaches to Public Health’ is a week-long course scheduled as the 2nd course of the year-long master’s programme. The objective is to orient students to the diversity of lived experiences and provide an overall understanding of the ground realities of communities which they will be serving as future public health professionals. Through this course, students critically explore how elementary cultural, political and socio-economic aspects within the contemporary developing world shape health determinants. The course takes on a solution centric approach whereby the sessions are designed around working with communities and the development of innovative small scale solutions, which engage students in learning by doing. We believe it is imperative to develop skills that allow public health professionals to understand the importance of and assess how health determinants/needs encompass factors beyond the biomedical. This is critical to inform and shape design, implementation and impact of sustainable health services and systems in an ever-changing world.

Year 2 2020

Course: GENDER AND SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS (MPH 660)

Description: This module will allow students to acquire a broad perspective on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) life cycle of adolescent girls and women; and acquire a layered understanding of the larger factors that shape their lives, their sexual and reproductive health, emotional and mental well-being. The course emphasizes experiential learning with facilitated discussions on SRHR, and how personal determinants of health impact as much as gender, social and structural factors, affecting one’s expectations, choices, constraints and decisions. The module will also discuss the SRHR needs and experiences of men, marginalised communities, including invisible sexualities (eg sex workers, transgender individuals) and the challenges they face from families, communities and in programmes. The students will initially visit the urban low-income community to understand specific SRHR issues faced by adolescent girls, young women and pregnant women/mothers from the lens of the community, followed by interactive and participatory classroom activities such as facilitated discussions, case study, gallery walk, role plays, presentation and feedback session etc. where learners will have an in-depth understanding of the SRHR concepts. Finally, through a synthesis session the students will try to compile and relate their learnings from the community and classroom. The second part of the course requires students to undertake an experiential field-based project on developing solutions to address Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) in two government Upazila Health Complex (UHC)s in rural Bangladesh. The immersive field work in this module helps students identify and analyze a public health problem, and gets students thinking about simple and feasible community centric solutions addressing the various aspects of health.

Year 3 2021 (Reform in progress)

Course: INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC HEALTH: ITS PURPOSE, VALUES AND PRACTICE (MPH 501)

Description:This course introduces the vision, values and community-centred ethos of 21st century developing country public health needs, and is introduced to a holistic model of health, with personal health as a critical dimension of public health and its complementarity with social dimensions of health. There is intensive urban and rural public health context learning and groups of students work to find solutions to public health problems.

The module is currently being redesigned and the faculty are receiving training. The details will be updated soon.