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Brighton & Sussex Medical School

Global Health Module Directory

BSMS > Postgraduate > Global Health

Global Health Module Directory

Core modules 2024-25


  • Globalisation and Health (20 credits)

This module provides students with a conceptual and practical understanding of the multiple, broad and often interrelated socio-political and economic determinants of health and ill-health within and across countries. In so doing the module empowers students to use a political economy of health perspective to critically examine current global health challenges and their potential solutions. Dr Mei Trueba, Senior Lecturer in Global Health, leads this module.

  • Global Burden and Management of Disease (20 credits)

This module introduces students to the spectrum of disease, injury and disability found across the world, focusing on the most prevalent diseases globally. It explores the existing control measures and the actors involved in order to develop students’ ability to understand and critically approach the strategies used to prevent and manage disease and disability, both globally and locally. This module is lead by Dr Anne Gatuguta, Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in Global Health.

  • Research Practice in Global Contexts (20 credits)

This module empowers students to plan and conduct ethical research within the broad field of global health. The module helps them to understand the fundamental principles that underpin different research approaches and critically assess which approach is appropriate for a given research aim or question. It also equips students with the practical knowledge and skills to undertake their own research. Dr Sohail Jannesari, Lecturer in Global Health, leads this module.

  • Dissertation or Research Project (60 credits)

The dissertation or research project allows students to develop an area of expertise through in-depth focus on a topic of their particular interest, with support from a supervisor. Students are expected to learn and work independently, supported by their supervisors, to access and critique information from a variety of sources, and competently design and report a research project. They will be required to obtain ethics approvals when needed. Dr Anne Gatuguta leads this module.

Optional modules 2024-25

  • Conflict, Violence and Health (20 credits)

This module builds students’ critical understanding of the complex relationship between conflict, violence and health. It examines conflict and violence at individual, community, national and global levels, critically analysing the factors and relationships that influence the development of different forms of violence in diverse contexts. The module helps students engage with and critically explore inter-disciplinary, inter-sectoral and inter-institutional interventions for prevention and control.

  • Infectious, Emerging and Neglected Diseases (20 credits)

This module examines the communicable diseases causing the greatest burden of disease in resource rich and poor settings and critically analyses the evidence informing prevention and control of communicable diseases.

  • Access to Medicines (20 credits)

The module introduces students to the importance of access to medicines for improving health and health equity globally. Some of the issues covered in this module are: actors and agencies involved in access to medicines; interventions for improving access to medicines and how they can be applied to emerging diseases; global aspects of substandard and falsified drugs; medicines pricing and affordability; medicines supply chain; access to medicines in humanitarian settings; global issues around adherence to and rational use of medicines; and the role of the pharmaceutical industry in access to medicines.

  • Economic Evaluation of Healthcare (20 credits)

Economic evaluation aims to assure the efficient use of healthcare resources and increase the transparency of resource allocation decisions. Starting from introducing the basic concepts in health economics, the module advances on methodological principles and recent developments in the theory and practice of economic evaluation. This module covers the main areas of economic evaluation including methods for measuring and analysing costs and health outcomes, ways of handling uncertainty, basics of economic modelling and principles of decision-making.

  • Epidemiology (20 credits)

This module aims to provide fundamental concepts and essential analytical methods pertaining to the design, analysis, and interpretation of epidemiological studies and health services research. It also aims to enhance competence in critically evaluating and communicating research evidence.

  • Health and Development (30 credits)

Despite current medical and technological advances, health status is desperately low in many parts of the world and millions of people lack access to basic services. This module examines a selection of some of the major issues facing health and development the 21st century. It explores how changes in demography, the burden of disease and the relative roles of markets, states and civil society have affected health problems and responses.

  • Global Laboratories: Biotech, Life and Society (30 credits)

This module explores how different societies deal with the dilemmas generated by global developments in the life sciences, including genomics, neurobiology and regenerative medicine. Concerns with bioeconomies, reproduction, euthanasia, eugenics, racial and ethnic identities, the environment, and human experimentation have yielded new theoretical perspectives and research
methods, which are explored in this module. We examine ethnographic and socio-cultural views of life science governance and the political-economies that underpin their local and transnational developments. A social-science perspective, here, is crucial to a contextual understanding of bioethics, individual choice, social justice, public health, cultural identity, human rights, and life values.

  • International Politics of Health (30 credits)

The Covid-19 pandemic marks a turning point in how health issues are addressed in international relations. We have entered a post-COVID, post-global, and post-colonial era. The module will examine this turning point through a historical and political analysis of health in international relations. It will trace the rise of ‘global health’ in the context of the post-Cold War period, which was dominated (culturally, economically, militarily and technologically) by the only remaining superpower, the U.S.

  • Migration Refugees and Wellbeing (30 credits)

Our contemporary world has been characterised as living through an age of migration, with an unprecedented number and diversity of people on the move around the world. The term migrant does scant justice to the range of people or the challenges faced by people leaving their home countries to make new lives elsewhere. Migrants' wellbeing is crucially influenced by the circumstances in which they leave their home countries and try to resettle.

This module will introduce students to the dynamics of migration in the contemporary world and implications for migrants' wellbeing, and for the development of health and welfare receiving societies. It will begin by introducing salient theories of migration e.g. push-pull, historical structural theories, transnational theories and migration systems theories, and explore their implications for research. Students will be presented with a categorisation of contemporary migration, including forms of voluntary and forced migration and the specific implications of these forms of migration for migrants' wellbeing.

These will be examined further through a range of case studies, drawing on first hand research of migrant reception in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, USA, Brazil, Malta and across Scandinavia. The first portion of the module will be largely devoted to examining migrants' needs and circumstances, the particular health and social care issues that may affect them and the challenges they face in the resettlement processes. The second portion will focus primarily on how receiving countries have responded to the perceived needs of migrants in terms, for example, of the development of ‘culturally appropriate’ health and social care services, special projects and a range of health and welfare interventions. The third part of the module will examine evidence of ‘good practice’ in relation to services aimed at enhancing migrants’ wellbeing and examine the potential for transferring good practice from one country to another.  

  • Sustainable Healthcare Principles (20 credits)

There is an urgent need for more environmentally sustainable, financially affordable and socially responsible healthcare. This module enables students to develop in-depth knowledge about the complexity of planetary health links to the healthcare sector and to apply the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to healthcare practice. 

  • Essential Statistics for Health and Medical Research (20 credits)

This module improves understanding and use of statistical methods and techniques. It is a pragmatic module and participants will be able to apply their learning immediately to practical applications using SPSS. They will produce reports demonstrating their ability to manipulate, interpret and apply data in real life and research situations.

  • Decolonising Health (20 credits)

If we want to address issues around health inequities, then we must decolonise health. This module develops the skills and critical understanding needed to do so through diverse knowledge sources. Decolonisation is explored in terms of knowledge and research, medical practice, health concepts and systems, and health institutions. We bring together students and lecturers in an inter-professional, inter-disciplinary and collaborative learning environment, encouraging them to critically analyse strategies to challenge colonial legacies in health settings, universities and beyond. Students will have the opportunity to learn from anti-colonial campaigning groups, indigenous community leaders, and academics from across the world.