Bachelor of Arts in Global Health (Honours) - Global Health Promotion and Disease Prevention

The Specialized Honours degree options combine core, foundational courses that all students take covering the sciences, social sciences, and humanities approach to global health, including courses on human biology (e.g., anatomy and physiology), disease processes (communicable and chronic diseases), public health (e.g., epidemiology, health promotion), research and implementation (e.g., global health research, program evaluation, healthcare planning), health systems and policy (social determinants of health, politics of health, global health governance), and ethics and law (e.g., global health ethics, human rights law).

Traditionally, when people talked about health, they primarily meant healthcare focusing on what we can do to treat illness and disease when it had already presented. This resulted in an overwhelming focus on the individual-level that concentrated on what happened inside a clinic or hospital. Health, however, is much more than healthcare, and there is much more we can do to reduce or prevent people from needing to see a doctor in the first place. What we do to keep people healthier longer is the focus of health promotion and disease prevention.

Health promotion and disease prevention uses both individual- and population-level interventions to address the social determinants of health and health equity. Health promotion focuses on reducing structural and behavioural risk factors that enable people to make better choices related to their health and reduce negative health outcomes across a spectrum of areas (e.g., diet and physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, and drugs, and mental health). Disease prevention focuses on early detection of disease (e.g., cancer screening programs), mitigation of disease spread (e.g., sexual health clinics), and minimizing disease risk factors (e.g., nutritional supplementation).

In addition to core courses, students in the Specialized Honours program take a minimum of 21 credits in electives from one of four areas of stream concentration shaped to their individual career interests: Global Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Global Health Policy, Management and Systems, Global Health and the Environment, and Global E-Health. In their final term, students take a 250-hour Integrated Global Health Practicum course, working in the field with academic institutions, government, and non-governmental organizations in Canada or internationally. This is followed by a 2-week intensive research capstone course.