Health Expert Blog

Do you feel prepared to discuss or debate health care issues? If not, the following free courses, supplied by noted universities such as MIT, may prove enlightening. The list below contains courses that range from health policy basics and public policy basics to environmental issues and aging as well as legal issues and conflict resolution.

This list is divided into categories, and each link is listed alphabetically within those categories. The university that offers the course is shown in brackets after each course description.

Health Policy Basics

1. Changing the Face of American Healthcare: This new course invites students to learn about strengths and weaknesses within the American health care system [Notre Dame].
2. Comparative Health Policy: The course shows how the historical development of the American health care system may limit policy options [MIT].
3. Introduction to Health Policy: This course focuses on four substantive areas that form the analytic basis for many of the health policy and management issues [Johns Hopkins].
4. Introduction to Technical Communication: Perspectives on Medicine and Public Health: Students only need a general interest in medicine or public health issues to tackle this course [MIT].
5. The Politics of Health Care: Learn about the uninsured in this country as well as health care roots, Medicare, Medicaid and more in this series of seminars [Columbia].
6. Understanding Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health Care: Learn basic economic concepts needed to understand the recommendations from the U. S. Panel on Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine [Johns Hopkins].

Public Policy Basics

7. Fundamentals of Public Policy: Explore policy-making as both a problem-solving process and a political process in this undergraduate course [MIT].
8. Poverty, Public Policy and Controversy: This course examines the main public policy frames that guide theory, research, policy, and practice into poverty, public policy and controversy [MIT].
9. Public Opinion and American Democracy: Explore how citizens’ thinking about politics is shaped and the role of public opinion in political campaigns, elections, and government in this course [MIT].
10. U.S. Social Policy: Examine the policy-making process in the U.S., why some alternatives are implemented and others abandoned, why some interests are privileged over others [MIT].
11. Values, Ethics, and Public Policy: How do moral and political values come into play in the American policy process? Learn about this issue and more from this course [Open Michigan].

Public Health Basics

12. Ethical Issues in Public Health: This course focuses on ethical theory and current ethical issues in public health and health policy [Johns Hopkins].
13. Health Across the Life Span: Frameworks, Contexts, and Measurements: This comprehensive course can help learners understand the complexity of health issues that face various populations across a lifetime [Johns Hopkins].
14. Medicine and Public Health in American History: Learn more about the conception of disease, health and healing throughout American history [Notre Dame].
15. Public Health Practice 101: Learn about four ways to describe and define public health and ten essential services [Johns Hopkins].
16. Public Health Preparedness & Emergency Response: This series of lectures deals with public health and history of emergency responses as well as changing policies [Berkeley Webcast].
17. Public Health Seminar: Dr. Frederick Burkel provides a seminar on “Public Health Emergencies: The Common Thread,” a topic delivered as part of a public health seminar cosponsored by the Department of Emergency Medicine [UCIrvine].
18. The History of Public Health: The content provides an historical interpretation of how the theory and practice of public health in today’s world has come to be what it is today [Johns Hopkins].

Health Policy in Specific Topics

19. Contemporary Biosocial Problems in America: Among major issues examined in this course are ideological uses of science, the biological basis of sex roles and homosexuality, behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and the meaning of race in medical practice [Tufts].
20. Coping with Mental Illness and Crafting Public Policy: This site focuses on a 2002 symposium that addressed public policy issues surrounding mental health care [University of California at Berkeley].
21. Disease and Society in America: This undergraduate course uses an historical approach to examine the changing patterns of disease, the causes of morbidity and mortality, the evolution of medical theory and practice, the development of hospitals and the medical profession, the rise of the biomedical research industry, and the ethics of health care in America [MIT].
22. Global Tobacco Control: Learn about the health and economic burden that tobacco creates and learn practical approaches to tobacco prevention, control, surveillance and evaluation [Johns Hopkins].
23. Measuring Health Disparities: Learn about health disparities and about a range of health disparity measures [Open Michigan].

Environment and Health

24. Biology of Water and Health: Learn how to think outside the box when addressing water-related problems [Tufts].
25. Environment and Society: This course examines environmental and social impacts of industrial society and policy responses [MIT].
26. Environmental Health: Topics in this course include how the body reacts to environmental pollutants and emerging global environmental health problems [Johns Hopkins].
27. Food Production, Public Health, and the Environment: Ever wonder why one billion people are under-nourished while another billion are overweight in this world? Take this course to learn more about this issue [Johns Hopkins].
28. Medical Ecology: Environmental Disturbance and Disease: What are the connections between the disruption of ecosystems and eruptions of human disease? [Columbia].
29. Public Health Toxicology: Learn about environmental toxicology, including information about the elimination of toxic agents as well as the fundamental laws governing the interaction of foreign chemicals with biological systems [Johns Hopkins].
30. The Politics of Pollution: This two-part series examines the impact of industrial production on public health and economics, including the politics of policy when it comes to environmental health [Columbia].
31. Watermanagement: This educational track focuses on understanding natural surface and groundwater streams and on managing, controlling and using water streams for society [TUDelft].

Pharmaceuticals

32. Computer-aided Drug Discovery for Infectious Diseases: This lecture covers some ways that modern theoretical and computational chemistry are contributing to the discovery of new pharmaceuticals [UCIrvine].
33. Exploring Pharmacology: This seminar imparts information on over-the-counter drugs, drug abuse, drug policies and more information [MIT].
34. Pharmaceuticals Management for Under-served Populations: Analyze problems and develop strategies based upon real world drug management issues [Johns Hopkins].
35. Principles of Drug Development: This course offers the underlying preclinical and clinical development of new therapeutic drugs and procedures as well as economic risks [Johns Hopkins].
36. Regulatory Requirements for Pharmaceutical Products: Learn about the requirements for pharmaceutical products and for the industry and how they were established [UCIrvine].

The Elderly and Managed Care

37. Aging and disability: transitions into residential care: Learn more about how settings for elder-care work in this module [Open University].
38. Health Issues for Aging Populations: This course introduces the study of aging and the background for health policy related to older persons [Johns Hopkins].
39. Managed Care and Health Insurance: This course covers basic concepts pertaining to private and public sector health insurance/benefit plans [Johns Hopkins].
40. Managing Long-Term Care Services for Aging Populations: Learn conceptual frameworks surrounding changes and health problems that accompany aging [Johns Hopkins].
41. Moral and Ethical Principles in End of Life Care: Learn what end-of-life care is about through this mini-course [Open University].
42. Neurology, Neuropsychology, and Neurobiology of Aging: Learn more about the loss of memory and other cognitive abilities in normal aging, as well as neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases [MIT].
43. Population Medicine: Directed at physicians, this course asks doctors to shift attention away from the pathophysiologic effects of disease on individuals, and refocus it on a public scale. The elderly are used as a population model in this examination [Tufts].

Legal Issues

44. Law and Society: This course emphasizes the relationship between the internal logic of legal devices and economic, political and social processes [MIT].
45. Law, Social Movements, and Public Policy: Comparative and International Experience: This course introduces theoretical frameworks from legal and social movement theories and focuses on the impact of the relationship between courts and grassroots activism on current issues [MIT].
46. Legal Issues Affecting the Terminally Ill Patient: This lecture focuses on the rights of terminally ill patients and how they may be affected by state and federal laws [Case Western Reserve University].
47. Resolving Public Disputes: Topics to be considered in this course include national, state, and local policy disputes [MIT].
48. Workshop on Deliberative Democracy and Dispute Resolution: This course features the Workshop on Deliberative Democracy and Dispute Resolution [MIT].

Collections

49. Harvard Medical School: Use your page search option to view lectures and papers on health policy issues found on this site [Harvard].
50. Health-Medicine: This series of podcasts and Webcasts covers current debates in health and medicine [University of Virginia].

Did you enjoy this article?