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  • Public Health Practice- understanding diseases and effective actions

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    Background
    The course builds on another course in this series 'Public Health - the basics', to provide examples of the practice of Public Health in understanding the burden, causes and interventions to control diseases, and how to evaluate Public Health interventions. The first section identifies the burden of illness, disease causation and the evidence base and policy options for interventions to reduce the population burden of illness. Crucial in the development of effective interventions is their evaluation - hence the second section of this course.

    We hope that after going through this resource, you will be able to:

    • Understand the burden of illness, the causes and how to develop evidence based interventions for some of the major diseases affecting populations in low-income settings

    • Become familiar with some key concepts of how to evaluate interventions

    • Reflect on how you might apply these learnings to your own setting

    Scope of the course

    There are two sections:

    • Patterns and major categories of disease
    • Evaluating interventions

    How to navigate the course

    Each section comprises some introductory remarks. To access resources we think you will find interesting - click on the hyperlinks and on the collections of resources. There is a forum in each section for reflection and a quiz at the end to check your understanding of some of the concepts.

    We encourage you to reflect on what you have learned or comment on the course. When you click on the hyperlink in each section labelled reflection, you will be able to add a new topic or respond to a previous one. You may want to share your learning from this and other readings, comment on the topics from your own experience, comment on others' posts, or provide feedback on how we can improve the content and presentation.


    In the final section you will see that you are eligible for a certificate - the requirements for this are to access the resources, post to the reflection forums in each section and pass the quiz. This is a self-directed course, to be taken at your own pace.

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  • Global disease patterns

    This section of the course aims to provide you with the opportunity to find out about health in a particular country, or region, and about major disease categories facing populations in the world.  After completion of this section, you should be able to:

    • assess the global burden and patterns of diseases in different countries and how they are changing over time
    • identify some of the challenges in the prevention and control of major communicable and non-communicable diseases in resources limited settings

    When considering the Public Health aspects of an disease, we usually try to explore the burden of the disease on the population, the causes (by understanding the epidemiology and social and cultural determinants) and the evidence base to allow treatment and prevention and control that will reduce the burden of disease. In this introduction to disease in developing countries, we can only briefly touch on some of these aspects, and have chosen to explore in this section issues relating to the burden of disease and some aspects of prevention and control; we will not be discussing treatment options.

    Prevention and control. Right at the start of this section, it is worth thinking about interventions for global control and prevention programs (we will discuss how to evaluate these in the next section of this course). The most well known global initiatives are the Sustainable Development Goals which replaced the widely acclaimed Millennium Development Goals (the UN site Millennium Development Goals 2015 and beyond is still available as a gateway to information about the MDGs). Many of the SDGs have a health component. You may find 'Real-time briefings on sustainable development and humanitarian action' of interest.

  • Evaluation of interventions

    This section aims to provide an introduction to the issue of evaluation; irrespective of your profession and where you work it is essential that you continuously evaluate whatever you do. In some aspects, evaluation is not optional and indeed may be a mandatory requirement. At the  end of the section, you should be able to:

    • understand how to apply a simple evaluation framework to any project or intervention
    • know how to identify develop indicators that allow you to demonstrate the results of the project
    • be able to identify 'successes' and 'lessons learned' for future projects.

    The Lancet editorial Evaluation: the top priority for global health states: "Evaluation must now become the top priority in global health. Currently, it is only an afterthought. A massive scale-up in global health investments during the past decade has not been matched by an equal commitment to evaluation. This complacency is damaging the entire global health movement. Without proper monitoring and accountability, countries and donors--and taxpayers--have no idea whether or how their investments are working."

    Evaluation can be defined both as a means of assessing performance and to identify alternative ways to deliver: as example the new Canadian Federal Evaluation Policy developed by the Treasury Board of Canada defines evaluation as "the systematic collection and analysis of evidence on the outcomes of programs to make judgments about their relevance, performance and alternative ways to deliver them or to achieve the same results.”

    As you explore the resources below, consider this case scenario:

    Imagine that you're a member of a project team who have been commissioned by your Ministry of Health to develop a project to reduce the impact of one major disease on your population. The Ministry is very keen to see the impact of their investment, and so you've been tasked with planning the evaluation of the project, to demonstrate your impact and learn lessons for the next project cycle. Remember that even though the evaluation takes place at the end of the project, you have to think about it from the beginning so that you can collect baseline data, monitoring data throughout the programme, and final data at the end so that you can show an impact - if you only think about evaluation at the end, then you won't necessarily have the baseline data so you won't know if you've had an impact.

  • Gain a Certificate

    At the end of the course, please reflect on the overall lessons you have learned that may be of use in your work. 

    Please do reflect on what you have learned.

    If you have completed the quiz, accessed the resources and posted to the reflection forums in each section, you are eligible to gain a certificate - click on the Certificate logo below.