Preventing Disease and Improving Population Health: an Interdisciplinary Approach

The prevention of chronic and infectious diseases has become increasingly important due to the growing burden on healthcare systems worldwide. With rising rates of chronic conditions, preventing these diseases can significantly reduce healthcare costs and improve quality of life. Additionally, effective infection prevention strategies, are essential to protect public health and prevent future outbreaks. Understanding preventive health requires the ability to connect insights from various scientific disciplines. Health is shaped by multiple, interconnected levels: from individual beliefs and everyday behaviors, to the environments in which people live, to the societal, economic, cultural, and political systems that influence access to resources and opportunities for healthy living. Because these influences are complex and interdependent, interdisciplinary knowledge and approaches are essential to understand health and to design effective strategies that prevent and improve across populations and contexts. Preventable diseases can broadly be distinguished into infectious diseases (e.g., foodborne infections, zoonoses) and non-communicable diseases (e.g., obesity, type 2 diabetes). In this course, students will acquire the knowledge and skills to adopt an interdisciplinary preventive health approach to effectively integrating perspectives of different scientific domains. They will also learn to appreciate to recognize and leverage the synergies that can arise from such approaches. The course will cover a range of emerging topics related to preventive health in daily life.

• Develop an interdisciplinary perspective to explain preventive health issues in the daily life

• Gain interdisciplinary insight into the origins and solutions of contemporary preventive health issues

• Apply interdisciplinary research methodologies and recognise their synergy in understanding preventive health issues

• Written test with open and closed questions (50%)
• Assignment report (50%)

• A reader will be available in Brightspace at the start of the course.