Introduction to Global Health Sciences

Course Description

Introduction to Global Health Sciences considers the influence of factors such as access to healthcare, biology, infectious diseases, societal status, culture, the environment, and the management of healthcare resources, on the well-being of people around the globe. Students integrate ideas from different disciplines to identify problems affecting society.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, HSC is the Health Sciences prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the College of Health. It is offered at approximately 2 Florida institutions.

⚠ The queue title for this number is "Intro to Global Health Science" and UWF agrees.

Global health is where the assumption that health problems are medical problems breaks down most visibly. The largest gains in global health came from water, sanitation, vaccination and nutrition rather than from clinical care, and the countries with the best outcomes are frequently not the ones spending the most — the United States being the standing example.

⚠ The field carries a difficult history that an honest course names. Global health grew partly out of colonial tropical medicine, and the pattern of external experts arriving with solutions for communities they do not know has a long and mixed record. The current emphasis on local leadership and capacity is a response to that, not a fashion.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites where they exist, and a description. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for a 3-semester-hour course. ⚠ Note what UWF does NOT publish anywhere in the HSC prefix: no fee notices on this entry, no "permission is required" marking, and no co-requisite blocks — which distinguishes it sharply from UWF's clinical health prefixes. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the scope and definition of global health.
• Distinguish global health from international health and tropical medicine.
• Describe the global burden of disease and how it is measured.
• Describe the epidemiological transition and its uneven progress.
• Describe major communicable diseases of global significance.
• Describe the rising burden of non-communicable disease in low-income settings.
• Describe maternal and child health as global priorities.
• Describe nutrition, food security, and their health consequences.
• Describe water, sanitation, and hygiene as determinants.
• Describe access to healthcare and the barriers to it.
• Describe health workforce shortages and migration.
• Describe health system financing and resource management.
• Describe the role of major global health organisations and funders.
• Describe the influence of culture on health beliefs and practice.
• Describe societal status, gender, and their health effects.
• Describe environmental factors in global health.
• Describe global health security and pandemic preparedness.
• Integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines on a global health problem.
• Evaluate a global health intervention critically.
• Describe ethical issues in global health work and research.

Optional Outcomes

• Relate the material to a Florida county using local data.
• Describe how the topic maps onto NCHEC Areas of Responsibility.
• Evaluate a current research paper in the topic area.
• Describe emerging developments likely to affect practice.
• Apply the material to your own intended career route.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Scope and definition of global health
• Global, international, and tropical distinguished
• Global burden of disease and its measurement
• The epidemiological transition
• Major communicable diseases
• Non-communicable disease in low-income settings
• Maternal and child health
• Nutrition and food security
• Water, sanitation, hygiene
• Access and barriers
• Health workforce and migration
• Financing and resource management
• Global health organisations and funders
• Culture and health beliefs
• Status and gender
• Environmental factors
• Global health security
• Interdisciplinary integration
• Evaluating interventions
• Ethics in global health

Optional Topics

• Florida county-level application
• NCHEC Areas of Responsibility mapping
• Current research
• Emerging developments
• Career application

Resources & Tools

• Skolnik, Global Health 101 — the standard introductory text.
• WHO (who.int) — free; country profiles, global health observatory data, and current outbreak reporting.
• IHME Global Burden of Disease (healthdata.org) — free interactive data; the best single tool for comparing countries and seeing how burden has shifted.
• World Bank Open Data — free; the economic and development indicators the health data has to be read alongside.
• Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org) — free; well-sourced and unusually good at showing long-run trends.
• MSF and other operational agencies' reporting — free; the view from delivery rather than from policy.
• Florida CHARTS (flhealthcharts.gov) — free; county-level health data for every Florida county, and the natural source for any local application.
• NCHEC (nchec.org) — free; the CHES Areas of Responsibility and eligibility requirements. Read them early.
• CDC (cdc.gov) — free; surveillance data, guidance, and the free Principles of Epidemiology self-study course.

Career Pathways

• Health education specialists — SOC 21-1091; the direct destination, and the role CHES certification exists for.
• Community health workers — SOC 21-1094.
• Florida county health departments and the Florida Department of Health — the largest public employer of this training in the state, and the route into outbreak response, chronic disease programmes, and community assessment.
• Hospital and health system community-benefit roles — AdventHealth, Orlando Health, BayCare, Baptist Health, and in UWF's own region Baptist Health Care and Ascension Sacred Heart in Pensacola. ⚠ Non-profit hospitals are federally required to conduct community health needs assessments, which is directly this skill set.
• Worksite wellness and employee health programmes — a substantial private-sector route, including Florida's large hospitality and tourism employers.
• Non-profit and community organisations — American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and local coalitions.
• Health insurers and managed care — member health and disease management programmes.
• School health education — ⚠ teaching health in Florida K-12 schools requires state teacher certification, which a health science degree alone does not provide. Plan the education route deliberately if this is the goal.
• Graduate pathways — MPH, health administration, physician assistant, and clinical programmes; this prefix is a common pre-health undergraduate route.
• ⚠ An honest note on entry-level work. Health education roles frequently start as grant-funded positions with fixed terms, and continuation depends on the grant rather than on performance. That is normal in the field and worth knowing before the first job rather than after it.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The credential this degree points at: CHES

• The Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES) credential, awarded by NCHEC, is the standard professional certification for health education graduates — the health-education counterpart of NCLEX for nursing or ASCP certification for laboratory science.
• ⚠ Eligibility is based on coursework rather than on a specific degree title. A candidate must hold a bachelor's degree and show a required number of semester hours addressing NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility. Which courses count is determined by content, so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions — they are the evidence.
• The Areas of Responsibility map closely onto this prefix: assessment of needs and capacity, planning, implementation, evaluation and research, advocacy, communication, and leadership and management. Most HSC courses are addressing one of them deliberately.
• ⚠⚠ Check eligibility before your final year, not after graduating. If a required area is not covered by your plan, it is far easier to add a course than to remediate afterwards.
• MCHES is the advanced credential, requiring experience beyond the entry-level certification.
• ⚠ Public health has a parallel route: the CPH credential from the National Board of Public Health Examiners, generally aimed at those with public health degrees. Health education and public health are related and are not the same field — see the note on that distinction below.

⚠⚠ Health education and public health are related fields, not interchangeable ones

• This matters here because the statewide inventory and UWF name these courses differently in ways that cross the boundary — the queue title for HSC3032, for instance, is "Foundations of Public Health" while UWF publishes "Foundations in Health Education."
• Public health is the broader field, encompassing epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, policy and management, and health behaviour. Health education and promotion is one of its components, focused on behaviour change, programme planning, and community capacity.
• ⚠ The credentials differ — CHES for health education, CPH for public health — and the graduate routes differ too: an MPH is the standard public health qualification, while health education has its own master's pathways.
• ⚠⚠ Do not assume a course satisfies a requirement written against the other field's name. Carry a syllabus, and check with the receiving programme or the credentialing body rather than matching on a title.

⚠⚠ The critiques the field makes of itself, which an honest course includes

• Global health grew partly out of colonial tropical medicine, and the resulting habits — external expertise, externally set priorities, short-term projects — have a long and mixed record.
• ⚠⚠ Short-term volunteer trips are widely criticised within the field. Untrained students performing tasks they could not legally perform at home, projects that displace local providers, and benefit accruing mainly to the volunteer are documented concerns. If you are considering one, ask who asked for it and what happens when you leave.
• ⚠ Vertical disease-specific programmes deliver results and can distort health systems, drawing staff and attention toward funded diseases and away from primary care.
• Health workforce migration transfers trained staff from countries that need them to countries that pay more, which is a real cost borne by the source country.
• Local leadership and capacity are the current emphasis, and it is a correction rather than a style.

⚠⚠ Health data invites causal error, and this is the field where it does damage

• Association is not causation, and most population health data is observational.
• ⚠ Confounding by socioeconomic position is pervasive. An analysis that attributes an outcome to a behaviour without accounting for income, education, housing and access usually ends up blaming the affected population for a structural problem.
• ⚠⚠ The ecological fallacy is the specific trap — inferring something about individuals from a group-level pattern. Two things being common in the same county does not mean the same people have both.
• Statistical significance is not practical importance. A large dataset detects differences too small to act on.
• ⚠ Health information is a crowded and unreliable environment. Distinguishing evidence from advocacy, and both from marketing, is a core professional skill rather than a classroom exercise.

⚠⚠ Social determinants dominate outcomes, and the field has to say so

• Medical care is a modest contributor to population health outcomes compared with income, housing, education, food security and environment. That finding is robust and is inconvenient for a system organised around treatment.
• ⚠⚠ An intervention that ignores determinants fails and then blames the participant. "Non-adherence" is frequently a description of a barrier the programme did not assess — transport, cost, working hours, childcare, literacy, or trust.
• ⚠ Florida is a Medicaid non-expansion state, which leaves a documented coverage gap for adults earning too much for Medicaid and too little for subsidies. Anyone working in community health here meets that gap constantly, and knowing the real referral routes — federally qualified health centres, free clinics, county health departments — is practical knowledge.
• Health disparities in Florida are documented and specific, and vary sharply by county, race and rurality. Florida CHARTS makes this visible at county level and is the natural starting point.
• ⚠ Cultural humility beats cultural competence as a working stance — asking the person in front of you rather than applying a group characteristic.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture and discussion; assessment normally combines examination with applied written work.
• ⚠ No permission marking, no fee notice, and no co-requisite is published for this course — HSC is a lighter-touch prefix than UWF's clinical health prefixes, and enrolment is not gated on cohort admission.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. ⚠ For health sciences there is an additional consideration: CHES eligibility is assessed on course content against NCHEC's Areas of Responsibility, not on course titles or numbers — so keep syllabi and catalog descriptions for every health course you take, because they are the evidence a credentialing body will want.

HSC2622 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.