Public Health Undergraduate Education
The Division of Public Health Policy and Practice is a resource for Public Health Undergraduate Education.
UVa's Division of Public Health Policy and Practice received one of the initial grants in 2006 from the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research (APTR) to develop undergraduate public health courses, and faculty from Division have led national workshops about UVa's public health courses and its Global Public Health Minor.
Ruth Gaare Bernheim, Director of the Division of Public Health Policy, is on the national Board of the APTR, and also serves on its undergraduate curriculum committee. APTR continues to play a lead role in the undergraduate education movement, and has co-sponsor with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) a Faculty Development program in undergraduate public health education. The Faculty Program has conducted three workshops in which more than 250 faculty from 60 institutions have explored ways to teach and integrate public health education into their institutions.
Ruth Gaare Bernheim, student Heather Lyu and Dr. Rebecca Dillingham (UVA Center for Global Health and Public Health Program) at the national APTR workshop in Washington, DC in July 2008.
Michael Druitt, UVA Visiting Scholar in Public Health and Assistant to the Dean and Pre-Health Coordinator at Hampton University, speaks with the Global Public Health Minors on addressing health disparities.
Public Health Education is a Hot Topic
"Today's students want to contribute, to empower individuals and communities to take charge of their own health," said Ruth Gaare Bernheim, who teaches health policy at the University of Virginia. "I think they also intuitively realize that the world is their community and that the gains of the 21st century will be in global public health." From the Washington Post, Friday, September 19, 2008; A01
APTR and AAC&U have produced a Curriculum Guide and recommendations for undergraduate public health education. The PDF of the recommendations is available at http://www.aptrweb.org/resources/pdfs/Recommendations.pdf
APTR's web site http://www.teachpublichealth.org/ includes valuable information and links for all those who teach or seek to teach undergraduate public health. Also see the Prevention Education Resource Center (PERC) web site at http://www.teachprevention.org/ for curriculum materials on undergraduate public health education.
AAC&U's web site http://www.aacu.org/ features materials on the Educated Citizen and Public Health movement and the data they are collecting on colleges and universities that offer undergraduate public health curricula.
The September 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine includes six article on undergraduate public health.The web site for the AJPM is http://www.ajpm-online.net/