Medical Mobility

Fac. Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

Medical Mobility

Full course description

In addition to the core courses offered during the first trimester in Maastricht, students will have the opportunity to enhance their knowledge about specific topics in the second trimester by choosing one of eleven elective tracks. These eleven tracks are carefully selected to avoid overlap with the core programme, while ensuring relevant contribution to the core programme.

This is the third course in the elective track "Implementing innovations on a global scale".

The course looks at different aspects of making innovations/interventions work in various contexts. How to design innovations that work in different contexts? How to scale-up solutions that worked in other settings? How to adapt existing solutions to local contexts? What capacities and evidence are needed? Does it even make sense to search for universal solutions given the risk that they do not fit diverse local contexts? How to take users into account? How to take the interrelatedness of actors and issues into account? What technologies, services and policy strategies are needed to cope with the complexity of today’s interlinked healthcare challenges? Such questions constitute the emerging research field of innovation dynamics in global health. The course focuses on the role of technology, infrastructure, industry, local knowledge and guidelines for interventions that travel to different contexts and examines how actors have tried to take those aspects into account. This includes reflections about how social scientists can intervene by means of research. The cases and literature will highlight the problem of making healthcare innovations work in other contexts from different angles, why the attempts so far often fail and analyze those which seem to be working or offer solutions that could work. It will become clear that we need to pay attention to underlying innovation processes. We will discuss solutions that have been proposed by different actors and disciplines and reflect in practical terms about innovations by making use of the theoretical insights learned throughout the previous courses in this elective track.

Course objectives

The two aims of the course are: Students should achieve the following:

to reflect on practical examples of making healthcare innovations work in different contexts and
to apply theoretical insights gained in the earlier courses (particularly MGh4010) to practical examples of healthcare innovations.

With regard to knowledge and insight:

To have insight in the challenges of innovation processes and in the solutions that have been proposed by different actors and disciplines to make healthcare innovations work in different settings
To gain basic knowledge in the applicability of science and technology studies (STS), medical anthropology and participatory forms of research concerning the design of innovations for global health;
To be equipped with innovative concepts and tools to critically assess and comment on mobility of healthcare interventions;

With regard to the application of knowledge and insights

To be able to apply concepts, principles and approaches pertaining to science and technology studies to the role of technology, infrastructure, industry, local knowledge and guidelines for making healthcare innovations work in different contexts;
To be able to apply concepts, principles and approaches pertaining to science and technology studies to different practical examples and analyse potential pitfalls in transferring healthcare innovations
To be able to conceptualize alternative design processes and research approaches to existing healthcare innovation projects

With regards to communication and learning skills:

To develop skills to present arguments and advices with regard to innovations in global health;
To develop skills to prepare written reports and oral presentations regarding healthcare innovations in global health in a concise and clear manner;
To develop skills to analyze but also to (re-)design global health interventions;

With regard to the formulation of judgments:

To develop a scientific – positive and critical - attitude towards the field of innovation dynamics in global health;
To develop the ability to criticize practical approaches to innovations in global health and their underlying fundamental assumptions;

Medical Mobility