Public health faces several challenges, including widening social inequalities, climate change, rapid urbanization, ageing, and perhaps even new pandemics. What they have in common, is that single (randomised) interventions are insufficiently capable of solving these challenges. Moreover, an explicit focus on the effectiveness of interventions leaves many policy-relevant questions unanswered.

This course aims to equip students with state-of-the-art knowledge how to evaluate public health interventions that contribute to population health.

Lectures will be combined with exercises and group discussions. Examples will come from recent evaluations of large contemporary public health interventions.

Objectives

• To apply a systematic framework for public health interventions to contemporary public health challenges

• To use observational data for the simulation of public health interventions

• To evaluate ‘natural experiments’ in the population

• To broaden the scope of the evaluation of public health interventions using a systems approach.

Participant profile

Epidemiologists and public health researchers with a specific interest in population interventions and policies.

Assessment