Student blogs

I would say that this course gave me the most challenging assignment ever in the programme. In return, I have learned a lot about how to evaluate intervention studies. Here is my experience of the Epidemiological Methods for Outcome Evaluation of Public Health Interventions course.

Teachers

The course leader was Elin Larsson. She and Rosaria Galanti gave us most of the lectures but we also had some guest lectors as usual.

Course Themes

These are the main topics we have learned.

• Evaluation goals and questions
• Efficacy and effectiveness
• Types of study design in Public Health evaluation (observational, experimental, Quasi-experimental)
• Examples of complex interventions
• Evaluation of policy interventions and community interventions
• Economic evaluation of healthcare programs
• Assessment of behavioral outcomes
• How to write an evaluation protocol

Course Schedule

This was 6 weeks + 2 days course mixed online ad campus teaching. some “self-study” hours were scheduled, so we could take time for readings and exercises.

Assignments

There were no mandatory assignments during the course, but some exercises were provided to us to understand more about the course topics. For each exercise, we were given 1-2 articles and a question sheet to fill in after reading those articles. Self-study hours were scheduled, so we could work on the exercises individually or in a group. After that, we had Q and A sessions about the exercises and teachers provided sample answers on Canvas.

Exam

The examination tasks were: 1) a written evaluation plan and 2) an oral presentation about challenges that we faced during writing the protocol.

1) a written evaluation plan

We were given an intervention case and asked to write an evaluation protocol of the intervention with background, method (sampling, sample size estimation, data collection, and statistical analysis, discussion (strengths and weaknesses of the study, validity, and implications). The most difficult part was the choice of the study design and I was struggling for 5 days to just decide one!

2) an oral presentation

We had an oral presentation and talked about the challenges that we were facing during the examination task. It was interesting to hear what the challenges were for the fellow students and how they solved the problems. I, of course, presented how difficult was to choose one study design and received some comments from my classmates. That was a very helpful session.

Finally

It would be more helpful if we have had peer-review and reviews from teachers before the submission date, if possible. Also, it was quite intense in the end due to the examination tasks, however, I liked learning different study designs for evaluation and many real-world examples.

I hope this review helped you to get to know about our program. Feel free to contact me if you have any kind of questions! Arigato 🙂

Sakura