This specialisation serves to introduce and integrate the key concepts of global health, globalisation and governance to understanding major challenges and threats to global health. It aims to provide learners with opportunities to understand the complex international setting of global health, the role of important stakeholders and the need for good governance in global health. Learners will be introduced to some of the most important challenges to global health and their implications in global health practice. Learners will discuss the main drivers of global health challenges, including global change and globalisation, and consider issues of inequity surrounding the impact of these challenges.
Learners will explore how the capacity to influence health determinants, status and outcomes cannot be assured through national actions alone because of the intensification of cross-border and trans-border flows of vectors, people, goods, services and ideas. By the end of the specialisation, learners should be able to effectively advocate, to a wide range of audiences, for specific action/s on topical global health challenges and propose evidence-informed measures that could be introduced to mitigate the impacts on health.
This specialisation will explore in depth two global health challenges; migration and climate change. The Climate change and health course was developed in collaboration with Imperial College's Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.
Applied Learning Project
In the Globalisation and health governance course, learners will conduct a literature review to evaluate evidence on a global health challenge (GHC) of their choice. Learners will explore a GHC they find interesting, and learn to critically evaluate evidence on it.
In Migration and health, learners will create an infographic on a GHC of their choice to communicate with the public and stakeholders. Public engagement is a key competency in global health and this will help learners distill knowledge from sources and convey complex ideas to a general audience.
In Climate change and health, learners will write a policy brief on a GHC of their choice, to communicate research or recommendations to policymakers. At the end of this course learners will submit a Capstone project, which consolidates the three previous projects into a cohesive whole, in which learners critically analyse a GHC using different lenses. We recommend using the same GHC throughout the specialisation.