A Transdisciplinary Approach to Population Health Education.

This Dean’s Note is co-written by Associate Dean of Education Lisa Sullivan.

Before I begin my Dean’s Note, I want to express my profound sadness for the mass attacks in Paris on Friday that claimed so many lives. The attacks followed by hours a suicide bombing in Baghdad. Our thoughts today are with all of those affected by this horrific wave of violence.  It seems like it was only yesterday that I wrote about the health consequences of hate. It is wrenching to refer back to it again so soon. 

On to today’s note. I have previously suggested that public health education should centrally aim to make sure our students understand the purpose of public health, preparing them to work towards the aspirational goals of the field. To that end, our education should have three goals: to transmit foundational principles to our students, to equip students with the right analytic capacities to prepare them professionally, and to engage trainees with work that aims to fulfill the aspirations of public health early and often. This suggests that the work of schools of public health is both to provide our students with the knowledge, skills, and attributes that prepare them for a lifetime of engagement with the health of populations, and to ensure that our graduates are equipped with the tools they need to contribute to better population health over their careers.

This broader goal rests on the principle that graduate education is an important first step and that the students will continue to assimilate knowledge many years after they graduate. Our role is to ensure that our public health students are knowledgeable about the foundations of public health but also understand the broader range of drivers of population health, including social structure, environment, sustainability, and law, to prepare them for public health careers. In addition, our role is to create an educational model that is accessible to other professions such that problems traditionally considered outside of the bounds of public health use public health principles, and vice versa. Our new BU MPH, to be launched in Fall 2016, aims to do just that.       

Motivations for the BU MPH

Several factors have motivated us to move towards the BU MPH.

First, the needs of public health are constantly changing, suggesting a need for commensurate change in public health education to better prepare students for the world they will face upon graduation, and many years hence.

Second, we face changing student demographics, an expansion in learning strategies, and an increased exposure to public health prior to graduate school among our students.

Third, we have witnessed a national movement to reevaluate public health education over the past several years. As a School, we have actively participated in the national efforts to investigate and address these issues through the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health’s Framing the Future initiative, including the MPH Expert Panel and the Blue Ribbon Survey of Employers.

Fourth, the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), our accrediting agency, has taken recommendations of the MPH Expert Panel into consideration in their criteria revision process, resulting in criteria that are more interdisciplinary and skills-focused to ensure that graduates are well prepared to tackle public health issues of the future.

Fifth, some of our peer schools have pushed forward with ambitious curricular reform efforts. Columbia University, for example, launched a new model for public health education in 2012. This program includes a core curriculum based on 18 modules organized into six studios that cover key foundational content, a focused discipline or concentration and optional certificates, leadership training, and an integrative seminar to address real-world public health problems. Other schools and programs have also revised their curricula to include multidisciplinary core courses, the most popular being a combined epidemiology/biostatistics course, and new concentration areas that reflect the changing needs of the field (e.g. informatics).

Informed by these forces, we have, over the past few years, embraced the innovative models developed in peer schools and learned from their experiences, and are moving towards an even broader and more innovative curriculum that aims to prepare our students for a lifetime of engagement with population health.

An Education That Builds on Our Strengths and Identity

As we have been developing the BU MPH, we have aimed to push the envelope; to develop an educational program that delivers to our students the best possible program that anticipates their evolving needs over time; and to recognize, respect, and build on our strengths. Since the School’s founding almost 40 years ago, we have attracted extraordinary students into our MPH. Applications to our program have more than doubled, and enrollments are up 170 percent over the last decade.

One of the core attractions of our School has been our standing as a top-tier research school with a deep commitment to education and public health practice. Our faculty combine cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to improving the health of all populations with an engagement in high-quality teaching and advising. Our faculty members have cultivated valuable relationships with practice partners and continue to advise and collaborate with alumni long after they have graduated—strengthening the community of learners that is SPH.

Our success in combining research and practice is reflected in our students’ success: 91 percent of our graduates find exciting jobs in population health within six months of graduating in careers that span a wide range of sectors, including hospitals, consulting organizations, foundations, nonprofits, academia, and local or state public health. We have built on our tradition of excellence in education by hiring additional faculty members focused on knowledge translation and building an education infrastructure; by increasing support for faculty in teaching, appointing associate chairs of education in each academic department; and by supporting the scholarship of our faculty who develop and translate new pedagogy across the School, University, and at national and international professional conferences.

The BU MPH

We now move into the next phase of our educational offerings, ensuring that our programs focus on training the next generation of public health professionals to solve the most challenging public health issues of our time. We aspire for our trainees to be agile in adapting to an ever-changing field; to become critical thinkers so as to devise interdisciplinary and creative solutions; and to be able to understand, interpret, use, and communicate data to inform decision-making.

The BU MPH is the School’s flagship program, launching in Fall 2016, to train the next generation of public health professionals to address population health. It builds on the strengths of our existing MPH program and features a truly integrated core curriculum, specialized interdisciplinary training in functional areas that reflect the needs of the workforce, and an in-depth professional development and practical experience program to prepare our graduates for their complex and dynamic careers.

At the heart of the BU MPH is an integrated core curriculum. To develop the integrated core, faculty from every discipline came together and, rather than trying to merge existing content, asked: What does every student need to know? For example, in thinking about the quantitative underpinnings of public health, we asked: What do public health professionals in global health or maternal and child health need to know and be able to demonstrate with biostatistics, epidemiology, and environmental assessments? This approach required faculty to think differently about course structure and depart from their own discipline-based public health training.

The resulting integrated core courses train students in the foundational knowledge and skills required for practice from a problem-solving perspective in four courses:

• Individual, Community, and Population Health
• Health Systems, Law, and Policy
• Leadership and Management in Public Health
• Quantitative Methods for Public Health

The courses are highly integrated but are also designed to adapt to the varied needs of our students. They may be taken concurrently or sequentially to accommodate the schedules of full-time and part-time learners. Content, interactive cases, and assessments have been carefully planned to ensure that the coverage of key foundational content is complete and reinforced across courses, and that the workload is manageable.

To ensure that we continue to attract intellectually diverse students from a variety of undergraduate majors, we have developed a suite of course-based and co-curricular resources and services to support our students. Our library of online resources allows students to explore course material more deeply and reinforce concepts independently outside of class time. To ensure the development of communication skills in all MPH graduates, public health writing will be an explicit theme in the core. Faculty with expertise in writing work with students to provide formal training in developing outlines, giving and receiving feedback, modifying drafts, and self-editing. While this is a very time-intensive component, it is more efficiently done in the core to prepare students to move into deeper levels of learning as they progress in the program.

Once students have mastered foundational knowledge and skills, they will select an area of specialization in the form of an interdisciplinary certificate in key functional and context areas for public health professionals. The functional certificates represent skills bases in demand by employers, and context certificates represent key areas of application of interest to our students, faculty, and the field.

The interdisciplinary certificates to be launched in Fall 2016 are:

Functional Areas

• Community Assessment, Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation
• Design and Conduct of Public Health Research
• Environmental Hazard Assessment
• Epidemiology and Biostatistics
• Health Policy and Law
• Health Communication and Promotion
• Healthcare Management (CAHME accredited)
• Monitoring and Evaluation
• Program Management

Context Areas

• Chronic and Non-Communicable Diseases
• Global Health
• Infectious Disease
• Maternal and Child Health
• Mental Health and Substance Use
• Pharmaceuticals
• Sex, Sexuality, and Gender
• Social Justice, Human Rights, and Health Equity

As the needs of the field evolve, the certificate structure allows for modifications to ensure that our graduates remain well prepared to be successful. This modular but integrated approach allows the School to be nimble and responsive to a dynamic field.

The professional development and practical experience component is the third, critical component of the program and includes an in-depth practicum, a culminating experience, and a career development program. The three components are synergistic in intent and design. The practicum and culminating experiences are academic requirements; thus, students are advised, guided, and assessed by faculty in terms of meeting learning goals and achieving competencies. The practicum and culminating experiences are linked to a student’s specialization (functional and context certificates) and allow students to gain relevant practical experience and to demonstrate, through a discrete work product, what they know and can do relative to their chosen career path, respectively.

As students aim to develop personally as well as professionally, they work with our Career Services Office on career development throughout their program. At orientation, students learn to assess their strengths and weaknesses, understand requirements to be successful in specific careers, and how to build their strengths and fill their gaps. As part of the core curriculum, students complete self-assessments to understand their work styles and preferences as well as strategies for working in teams. Students also work with Career Services to identify practicum sites, prepare resumes and cover letters, and learn interview skills. Students complete sessions on LinkedIn, networking, and negotiating in order to prepare themselves for not only their first job after graduation, but for the duration of their public health careers. Alumni may also access Career Services at any point in their careers.

Lifelong Learning

The BU MPH is an exciting new program for our students, and its modular design lends itself to more accessibility across disciplinary lines. Affecting population health requires more radical integration and collaboration across sectors. Our scholarship must take a wider view to encompass economic, social, and contextual factors that affect health. We need to ask the right questions in order to help move us to the right answers. We cannot do this alone. We need architects, lawyers, physicians, engineers, city planners, farmers, journalists, and educators, to name just a few, working together with public health in mind. Our new design offers opportunities for our alumni, students in other graduate degree programs, University employees, and outside professionals to take a certificate in public health, one of our functional or context certificates. In a future Dean’s Note, I will detail our plans for lifelong learning with opportunities for anyone interested in learning more about public health—online or in person, in credit bearing or non-credit bearing courses—that will, building on the work of our School community over the past several years, introduce opportunities for the engagement of partners across sectors in our educational initiatives.

I hope everyone has a terrific week. Until next week.

Warm regards,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Professor, Boston University School of Public Health
Twitter: @sandrogalea

Previous Dean’s Notes are archived at: https://www.bu.edu/sph/category/news/deans-notes/