Public Health Practice

School of Medicine

Public Health Practice will introduce students to key topics, concepts and methods in Environmental Health and Public Health Surveillance. Basic environmental epidemiology, use of evidence in policy and practice, along with an overview of the main environmental exposures will be explored. This course also examines an overview of public health surveillance as a lens to public health practice, in terms of how public health programs are organized, financed, and operated and what surveillance data are available to inform specific programs. Public health practitioners and policy-makers who plan, implement, and evaluate infectious disease, chronic disease, injury, and disability prevention and control programs have a need for reliable information about the status of these health problems among the populations they serve. Surveillance systems provide information for action. Analyzing, interpreting and using public health surveillance data inform the design, operation, and delivery of public health programs and target public health action and disease control. Public health surveillance is the ongoing process that public health agencies use to collect, manage, analyze, interpret and disseminate this information. We will review basic approaches to public health surveillance, including disease reporting regulations and notifiable diseases, surveillance for infectious diseases, chronic diseases, and adverse events, uses of surveillance data, and how surveillance data can inform public health program, policy, and practice. The course will be taught by a multidisciplinary group of faculty using didactic and interactive elements of instruction.