Student blogs

This was our first course as the Epidemiology track separated from Health Promotion and Prevention. It was very exciting to interact with epidemiologist from a wide range of research area! Personally, this small epi class made me more active to talk and discuss in class.

Teachers

Our course leader was Ana Requena Mendez and she gave us some lectures and assignments. We also had Enoch Yi-Tung Chen who taught us the STATA lab during the course. There were some guest lectors and they introduced some important course topics.

Course objectives

The course aimed to give advanced knowledge of epidemiological surveillance and its application within different contexts in the public health area.

• Define different methods of epidemiological surveillance and its critical components
• List the main fields of use of descriptive epidemiological data
• Describe the data sources that are used for epidemiological surveillance in different contexts
• Assess the quality of various epidemiological surveillance systems
• Carry out and interpret statistical analyses of population based data to describe occurrence and distribution of health and health determinants

Course schedule

This was a 3 and half week online course. Tuesdays were for individual work, so we could read course literatures and work on STATA. Many Q and A sessions were provided and they helped to ask questions regarding to the individual assignment.

Assignments

We were asked to submit the individual assignment which consists of the compilation of a short “public health report” and a short oral presentation. It was like a small thesis and we set the research questions related to public health using the data set from the Stockholm Public Health Cohort in 2002, 2006 and 2010. The written assignment included:

• Abstract
• Introduction – including literature review, aim, and research questions
• Methods – Descriptive data analyses
• Results – including tables and figures
• Discussion – including relevance for public health policy/practice and limitations), comparison with LMIC, and references about how the surveillance or the epidemiological situation of topic you have chosen has been modified with the COVID-19 pandemic
• Conclusion – Interpretation

Group work

We did not have group assignments, but many breakout room discussions on Zoom. There were some of the themes:

• Trend in under 5 mortality in Uzbekistan and Nigeria
• Compare 2 countries in terms of DALYs and risk factors, explain the differences
• Compare 2 countries in terms of tobacco use

Exam

The individual assignment was the examination for the course and the assignment was graded “Fail” “Pass” or “Pass with distinction“.

Finally

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