Epidemiology

Course Description

Epidemiology is a study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency, distribution, and causes of diseases and other events that impact the health and safety of the human population. Programs and strategies to prevent and control such events and diseases are explored.

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 11 Florida institutions.

At approximately 11 Florida institutions this is the second most widely taught course in the prefix, and it is the analytical core of public health.

Epidemiology is the discipline that made public health a science rather than a set of opinions. Its method — count events, define the population at risk, compare groups, and ask what could explain the difference other than the thing you are interested in — is simple to state and unforgiving in application. The recurring lesson is that the obvious explanation is frequently confounded, and the discipline is largely a catalogue of ways to be wrong.

⚠ This course is quantitative. Students arriving expecting a descriptive health course are regularly caught out; rates, ratios, and study design reasoning are the content.

⚠ 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

• Define epidemiology and describe its role in public health.
• Distinguish incidence, prevalence, morbidity, and mortality.
• Calculate and interpret rates, ratios, and proportions.
• Explain why crude rates mislead and apply age standardisation.
• Describe person, place, and time in descriptive epidemiology.
• Describe the epidemiological triad and models of causation.
• Describe natural history of disease and levels of prevention.
• Describe surveillance systems and their purposes.
• Describe reportable disease requirements and how notification works.
• Describe descriptive study designs and their appropriate uses.
• Describe cross-sectional, case-control, and cohort designs.
• Describe experimental designs including randomised controlled trials.
• Calculate and interpret relative risk and odds ratios.
• Interpret confidence intervals and statistical significance.
• Identify selection bias, information bias, and confounding.
• Apply criteria for evaluating a causal relationship.
• Describe screening and evaluate sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value.
• Explain why predictive value depends on prevalence.
• Describe outbreak investigation steps in order.
• Describe prevention and control strategies and evaluate them.
• Interpret published epidemiological studies critically.

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

• Definition and role of epidemiology
• Incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality
• Rates, ratios, proportions
• Crude rates and age standardisation
• Person, place, time
• Causation models
• Natural history and levels of prevention
• Surveillance
• Reportable disease and notification
• Descriptive study designs
• Cross-sectional, case-control, cohort
• Experimental designs
• Relative risk and odds ratios
• Confidence intervals and significance
• Bias and confounding
• Causal criteria
• Screening; sensitivity, specificity, predictive value
• Predictive value and prevalence
• Outbreak investigation
• Prevention and control strategies
• Critical appraisal

Optional Topics

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

Resources & Tools

• Gordis, Epidemiology — the standard and unusually readable introductory text.
• CDC Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice — free self-study course; working through it alongside the class is the single most effective supplement.
• CDC MMWR — free; real outbreak reports written to a consistent structure, and the best available model for how an investigation is reported.
• Florida Department of Health reportable disease list and surveillance reports — free; what must be reported in this state and how quickly.
• A spreadsheet — two-by-two tables, rate calculations and standardisation are best learned by building them once yourself.
• 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 concepts that decide whether an epidemiological claim holds

• Confounding is the central problem. A third factor associated with both exposure and outcome produces an association that is real in the data and wrong as an explanation.
• ⚠ Age standardisation is not optional when comparing populations. A county with more older people shows higher rates of many diseases for that reason alone, and a crude comparison between such populations is meaningless.
• ⚠⚠ Predictive value depends on prevalence, and this is the most consequential result in the course. A highly specific test applied to a low-prevalence population produces mostly false positives among its positives — which is why screening programmes have criteria rather than being applied to everything.
• Relative risk and absolute risk tell different stories, and a doubling of a very small risk is still a very small risk. Reporting only the relative figure is the commonest way findings are overstated.
• ⚠ Case-control studies give odds ratios, not risks, and the two coincide only when the outcome is rare.
• Causal criteria are a framework for judgement, not a checklist that proves causation.

⚠⚠ 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.

HSC4500 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.