Systems Thinking in Health

3 units

The major challenges facing global and public health in the 21st century are truly daunting; they include global climate change, global pandemics along with the rise of vaccine denial, threats to food systems and physical activity, persistence of income disparities and health inequities; and healthcare systems that are fracturing as a result of multiple financial, legal, political, and governmental pressures. These 'wicked' problems resist easy solution, and they call for new ways of thinking, studying, evaluating, and implementing. Systems science is a relatively new interdisciplinary paradigm that suggests new ways of addressing these pressing public health challenges. The goal of the new Systems Thinking in Health class is to introduce systems thinking skills and knowledge to graduate students in public health and other closely related disciplinary programs. The course will be conceptual and historical in nature, showing how systems concepts can be an alternative (and sometimes more effective) approach for understanding public health, compared to more usual research, evaluation, and intervention traditions. The course weaves together three broad types of activities: 1) exploration of core systems science concepts such as complexity, holism, dynamics, feedback, nonlinearity, and heterogeneity; 2) understanding how various public health challenges can be viewed through a systems lens such as global pandemics, nutrition and obesity, violence, global warming and environmental change, and health equity; and 3) introducing based systems science research and evaluation methods, including systems mapping, system dynamics modeling, network analysis, and agent-based modeling. At the end of the class, students will be able to: Articulate how major public health problems are embedded in complex systems, in and of themselves Understand the basic concepts and principles of systems science Understand how systems concepts and methods have been historically used to address critical health problems (e.g., modeling for pandemic preparedness) Reframe a specific public health problem in systems terms to support subsequent research, evaluation, or program implementation