Equity should be the guiding principle in working with historically vulnerable communities no matter the region or country. Students will examine the history of global health and its roots in colonial and tropical medicine that prioritized the health and wellbeing of the colonizers while exploiting the Indigenous populations. This course will look at how global health has been conducted in the past, how it is practiced today, and a collective vision for global health practice in the future.
Understanding and appreciating a variety of perspectives and defending the viewpoints of those with lived experience from historically vulnerable communities is a key lesson of the course. Students will be asked to expand their views to a global perspective that considers cultures and ways of working different from their own, while being conscious of the origins of their own views. The course will also ask students to think carefully about partnerships between agencies, governments, and a variety of sectors working together, and across regions of the world (e.g. global south and north), and the impact of western colonialism.
Students will learn to design, monitor, and evaluate global health programs and projects in partnership with communities and other stakeholders, identifying and adopting interventions that the community embraces and prioritizes. At the heart of the course will be ethical approaches. We will examine the sharing of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Students will be encouraged to consider climate, migration, epidemics, pandemics, pan-epidemics, planetary health, and humanitarian and natural disasters. The course will introduce a number of tools, structures, operational frameworks, ways of working, engines for change and advocacy, UN agencies and other actors, networks/systems, that lead action in Global Health and One Health.
One Health is the triad of human, animal, and environmental health. It is a pillar that is now integrated into work by the World Health Organization, US CDC, US NIH, USAID, US White House, many governments, ministries of health, centers of disease control in other nations and regions (e.g., African CDC), and a host of NGOs working worldwide. Equity is the key principle in One Health (e.g. COVID, HIV, H5N1). In 2022 four United Nations organizations formed the Quadripartite Collaborative for One Health: These four are the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organization of Animal Health (WOAH), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and the UN Environment Programme. (UNEP).
The course will introduce students to experts and professionals working across a spectrum of global health areas and specialties. This will include experience from the past 10 years of Dartmouth’s Center for Global Health Equity under the leadership of Dr. Lisa Adams. Students will be asked to consider the impact of their work beyond the health sector such as community autonomy, local leadership, political contexts, media, economics, and foreign relations (China, US, etc.).
1.00 Dartmouth Units: (HP, P, LP, NC)
*Core Requirement for Residential MPH
Prerequisites: PH 110
Offered: Winter - Tuesday and Thursday 10:15 am - 11:55 am