Curriculum - Grad

NURS5150
Sociocultural Influences on Health

This course is intended for students interested in U.S/Global Healthcare. It includes lectures, discussions, readings, and written assignments focused on various social, cultural, and economic factors that impact the health and illness perceptions and behaviors of various ethnic and minority groups. In particular, it focuses on how culture affects health and disease, and how health and disease affect culture.This course takes a critical approach to knowledge development by scrutinizing values, theories, assumptions, and practices cross culturally. It relies upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze how disease is diagnosed, treated, and experienced differently in various cultural contexts. At the same time, students will have the opportunity to examine and critique cultural assumptions and theories, the shifting nature of cultures, the situational use of cultural traditions, and the ethnocentrism of contemporary Western health care. Special attention is given to the influence of race, class, gender, religious, and spiritual ideas about health and illness.

PUBH 5190
Foundations of Global Health

This course provides an introductory overview of global health, with the primary aim to engage and inspire students about the opportunities and challenges of global health. Using an interdisciplinary approach to global health with an emphasis on addressing both global and local health disparities, learning formats include case-based analysis, small group discussion, faculty presentations, panels, and debates. Using the lens of health equity, this course provides an overview of many current issues in global public health and frameworks to address them, including: measures of disease burden; frameworks for health equity and rights; determinants of health; environmental health and safe water; control of infectious diseases; non-communicable disease programs, nutritional challenges; harm reduction and behavioral modifications; women’s reproductive rights; health economics and cost-effective interventions; health manpower and capacity development; globalization challenges and potentials. At the completion of this course, the student will be able to: (1) understand that global health involves multiple academic disciplines, and identify many of these; (2) understand that global health theory involves many, sometimes conflicting, belief systems, and identify some of these; (3) understand that global health can be conceived as a complex ecosystem, which involves issues that are much broader than the traditional health disciplines; (4) cite examples of specific issues and case studies in global health; (5) understand some of the potential interventions that can be used to ameliorate problems in global health, particularly in low-income countries.

Fall

1 Course Unit

NURS5350
Comparing Health Care Systems in an Intercultural Context: Study Abroad

This course offers students an opportunity to: 1) expand their knowledge base in health care systems; 2) develop intercultural competency skills and 3) shape a conceptual framework for improving the quality of health care for the individual, the family, the community and society at large. Emphasizes the relational, contextual nature of health care and the inseparability of the notions of the health of individuals and the health of family, society, and culture. Includes field experience.

NURS5450
Maternal and Infant Care in the Americas

This clinical elective will provide an intensive historical, sociopolitical, and cultural perspective of health and health care delivery in the Americas with a special emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean. Classroom, direct clinical care and field experiences are designed to provide students with a broad view of the history and culture system of the country of focus. The delivery of health care to women and children will be explored from a sociopolitical, cultural and historical context. Service learning experiences are an integral component of this course. The course includes 5 seminars on campus and 10-14 days on site in the country of focus. The country of focus may vary each semester.