Designing transformative public health education for the developing world: How one course re-imagined a more indigenous MPH

Abstract

This manuscript proposes a novel version of an academic program for community outreach in Native populations of Bangladesh. The curricular content was designed to gather and comprehensively understand community health experiences, and the design methodology proposed structured student learning around integrative factors that determined community health realities. The authors refer to the need to curricularly assign a basic human health need, such as water, nutrition, housing, sanitation, or work, so as to undertake an in-depth exploration of that topic and understand the practical conceptual foundation and interdependencies among the social determinants of health that produce community health outcomes. This document showcases student projects, their own practical solutions to real health problems, and how they and their community of teachers successfully learned and carried out simple solutions that can be applied to disadvantaged communities.