Public Health Epidemiology

This course will enhance your understanding of public health epidemiology, the science upon which public health is based. Public health epidemiology involves describing and interpreting geographical and temporal patterns in population health, identifying prevention strategies, and estimating and evaluating the impact of risk factors and preventive measures on population health. It is therefore essential to have a thorough understanding of public health epidemiology if your work or study involves any public health-related issues. This course is therefore highly suited to epidemiologists in universities, hospitals, municipal health services and other governmental health organizations, and to PhD candidates working on an epidemiological or public health thesis.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Describe the typical features of public health and public health epidemiology
• Weigh and compare the effects of high-risk versus population strategies for prevention

In particular, you will be able to:

• Reproduce at least 5 different measures of population health, their interpretation and use in public health policy or practice
• Calculate life expectancy from life-table data and construct survival curves
• Describe dilemmas in the implementation of population measures for smoking reduction from a societal, economical and health perspective
• Calculate the effect of exposure to risk factors on life expectancy and attributable fraction
• Weigh and interpret the contribution of risk factors to population health
• Describe types of input required to model future trends in population health
• Describe the main underlying factors causing certain patterns in population health
• Apply epidemiological methods to study ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in population health
• Interpret results from multilevel analysis to disentangle effects of a shared environment (contextual effects) and individual risk factors on population health