IHTM Course Content
So we have three terms over the course of the one year programme. The first term we tackle subjects such as paradigms and tools for global health. So Paradigms and Tools is basically saying what are the different kinds of methodologies that you, as future global health leaders, will need to be able to engage with in order to be able to understand the challenges and be able to devise creative solutions for them? So we have topics such as epidemiology statistics but we also have qualitative and mixed methods. We have introductions to health economics as well as finance and management.
In the Challenges and Change in International Health module, we have classes that touch on different types of health challenges as they manifest in resource limited context and the kinds of solutions that work but as well what solutions don't work and why, and thinking through those types of ways in which that they may be addressed. We don't aim to cover all the diseases that we could possibly have in our various contexts because that would just simply take too much time. Rather we take diseases that provide examples of the ways in which we can begin to consider creative solutions.
The Global Health Research and Practise module contains a number of different elements that are really key to, again building the capacity for global health leadership. And in particular we cover issues such as ethics in public health practise and research and health systems and health systems research, but as well the health system issues that are very relevant to devising solutions.
Underlying all of the academic year we have a Leadership Management and Communication training programme and this is the soft skill development. This is important because it's not just enough to know how to generate evidence or critically engage with that evidence, but it's how you communicate that evidence in order to be able to affect change. And we look at communicating that evidence to different audiences. These are public audiences via the media or other modalities, but as well looking at policy audiences, academic audiences and so forth. We do provide debate training and we have trainers who are Oxford debaters and we provide opportunities to develop policy briefs and go to the UK Houses of Parliament and present those policy briefs. So these are just some examples of the kinds of activities that will help increase confidence but also increase the skills of how do you communicate your messages.
In addition, in the leadership and management training, we have negotiation training, we have stakeholder management workshops, et cetera. Again, as part of understanding that what we expect our graduates to be doing and what types of skills that they will need to be able to operate most effectively in those spaces of leadership.
In the second term, we have a set of modules ranging from vaccinology, the cutting edge of vaccine development, to reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health, mathematical modelling and infectious diseases, health innovation and entrepreneurship, international development and health as well as development, environment and health - the latter of which we share with the School of Geography and Environment.
So these modules allow students to choose, you don't take all of them. You don't have time to take all of them. It's a very condensed and very intensive course. So students choose two modules to take with an option to audit, as we say, the third module if they are able to manage their time. And this allows a more in-depth investigation of a particular topic of interest to candidates.
In addition, during the second term there's a lot of leadership and management elements and a lot of group work and group activities that the students undertake. And they will also be preparing during that second term for their third term placement because in the third term our students go out and we send the students out into the field to undertake a research placement, as we call it. So you do some work in another resource, limited setting and different from the one that you have experience in and we like to send our African students to Asia, our Asian students to Africa and so forth in order to extend and expand the experiences that our students gain on the course.
So during the second term students will be preparing for their placement projects and preparing for proposals that they then go on to work on during the two months of their third term. After the third term, students come back having experienced all the wealth of interactions that they are able to engage with on that placement. They returned to Oxford for a week of engagements and media training and then having time to write up 10,000-word dissertation that's related to their research placement project that they undertook in the third term.