Population Health
Historically, health policy has focused almost exclusively on sickness services provided by agencies such as the National Health Service. Although this focus on health care remains hugely important, it is increasingly complemented by aspirations to improve the health of the population by tackling the social determinants of health such as poverty and pollution and by encouraging people to adopt health promoting behaviours such as healthy diets and increased physical activity and to stop health damaging ones such as smoking. There is also growing national and international concern that improvements in health should be fairly distributed by reducing health inequalities.
The School for Health organises its work related to population health improvement in three main ways. Much the largest element in the population health portfolio is related to sport, health and exercise science But the School attaches growing importance to tobacco control and health inequalities.
The School's teaching programmes in Population Health involve:
- Sport & Exercise Medicine, the world-renowned flexible masters programme exclusively for doctors
- Sports Physiotherapy, a new programme launched in 2007 exclusively for physiotherapists
- The innovative Professional Doctorate in Health which focuses on both Population Health and Healthcare within the School, providing a doctoral level programme to develop expert practitioners and researchers in practice