Introduction to Public Health

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Public Health is the multidisciplinary field of research, practice and policy that aims at promoting health and preventing disease. The aim of this course is to provide you a vivid view on public health and insight in its basics, its methods and the organizations involved in public health. Various aspects of public health, such as healthy eating will be addressed from an ecological perspective in which we distinguish the individual, the family, the organizational, the community/environmental and the global level. You will study the role of public health on every distinct level and will ask yourself if public health interventions should aim at the individual, the collective or the environment. What is the role of public health for the chronically ill? How can public health aim at the family? How can we explain socio-economic health differences and does the built environment play a role in public health problems? How can we protect/promote health in the occupational setting and what about health, prevention and public health in the developing countries? This course includes a field exploration assignment. During this assignment you will visit Kokkerelli, the Kids University for Cooking, to make empirically informed observations of a real life problem that concerns public health at the family level. Subsequently, you will use the findings of your observations to formulate a well-argued proposal for improvement of the programme of Kokkerelli, and you will report on this proposal in a brief presentation.