Welcome from the Programme Directors
Welcome from the programme directors
Welcome to the MSc programmes in global health, and to the intercalated BSc in global public health and primary care, at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Masters and intercalating students are unusual people. They are usually academically able, hungry for challenges, and keen to learn. Students who join the first cohort of a brand new course are even more unusual. Most (though not all) are innovators who are prepared to share some uncertainty in order to be part of something new and creative.
We received over 200 applications for these MSc programmes, and 35 to the BSc. We offered places to about half of them. For our first group of students, we chose people whose applications impressed and inspired us and who we felt would contribute to improving them for subsequent cohorts of students. We are excited about working with you all to deliver and shape programmes that we hope will train a new generation of global health leaders. As you can imagine, evaluation and feedback will be particularly crucial in this formative year, and we hope you will bear with us if we ask you frequently about your experiences on the programmes.
As someone who has signed up for the first, innovative, year, you have almost certainly made major sacrifices to find funding and protected study time. Getting to the starting line is an achievement in itself! You have placed yourself in a self-selecting group of highly committed individuals, and you appreciate the importance of investing in your own intellectual and professional development. You will rightly expect value for money from this course, and a return on your investment in the future. Perhaps you view your degree as a means to an end – achieving a promotion, changing career, or pursuing your own particular vision for research, teaching, or service development in your own country or region.
We hope that one of your goals is to acquire valuable academic skills, such as the ability to think critically, evaluate the published literature, and write papers of your own that are authoritative, balanced, and scholarly. As well as looking to gain a broad perspective on the overall academic basis of global health, health systems, or primary health care, you are probably keen to become more knowledgeable in subject areas that particularly interest you and that address your local needs and priorities. You may be eager to contribute an area of particular expertise to your learning groups, and if so, please tell us about your unique strengths and skills.
Alternatively, you may be concerned about some of your weaknesses – and you may even be hoping that certain topic areas are not compulsory on these programmes! They are interdisciplinary and no student will have knowledge in all the subjects; everyone will have some areas where they are strong, and others where they face challenges.
Finally, you are probably keen to meet new people – both tutors and fellow students – who will provide contrasting experiences and perspectives on the theory and practice of primary health care. You probably already know that there are no simple or universal answers to the complex questions about public health, health policy, and primary care as they are practised across the world in different cultures and contexts.
But putting ‘universal answers’ aside, there are still many lessons to be learned and principles to be distilled from the reflective sharing of experiences and perspectives between professionals from a range of countries and professional backgrounds. This is why we have set up this course as [a] international, [b] interprofessional, and [c] interdisciplinary, and why we place as much emphasis on your contributions as on the papers and other resources we have made available in the reading materials. We hope that you share our vision for creating a vibrant community of practice that transcends, and builds on, our various individual experiences of learning and professional practice.
The early lectures and seminars will address all these issues in more detail. In particular, we will ask you to share your own reasons for signing up; tell us a bit about who you are and where you work; consider what you can offer your learning groups; set out your main hopes and fears about the programme at this early stage; and begin to plan how you will get what you need out of it. We will consider in more detail the theoretical basis of epidemiology, health systems, health inequalities, and the socio-cultural context of illness and healthcare. We will introduce the many underpinning disciplines of global health, its untidy and contested knowledge base and the lack of transferability of ‘evidence’ to different cultural settings. We will invite you to reflect on, and critically discuss, a number of tensions for which there are no simple or universal answers – ‘best care’ versus ‘affordable care’; prevention versus treatment; clinical efficacy versus organisational efficiency; healthcare as a business versus healthcare as a public good, and so on.
Finally, you will find that the teaching style adopted by most tutors on this course is informal, collaborative, and non-hierarchical. Of course we have knowledge and insights we want to impart. But we also believe that everyone on the course is a learner, and everyone also has the potential to be a teacher. In other words, we see the course as a ‘collaborative learning environment’ in which tutors and students together create a new, dynamic, and contemporary knowledge base, rather than a more old-fashioned classroom in which static knowledge passes in one direction only – from the tutor to the students. You may find this approach unusual (and perhaps unsettling) if you have been used to more traditional forms of teaching. If you have any questions or concerns about the programmes structure or about the way you are expected to learn, please feel free to contact your academic advisor or one of the other programme team.
We wish you an enjoyable, stimulating, and worthwhile learning experience and we look forward to getting to know you all.
Professor Trisha Greenhalgh
Professor Allyson Pollock
