CHL5631H: Integrating Public Health and Clinical Care – The case of TB

Course Directors: Xiaolin Wei & Ross Upshur.

Tuberculosis (TB) care and serves is a perfect example of integrating public health and clinical care. TB is a historically deadly disease having killed over 1/6 people in England in the 1900s. The Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) has demonstrated as the most cost-effective treatment and control strategy in the 1970s, and then it has been promoted as the national strategies worldwide since the 1990s. TB is now a curable disease with effective treatment (i.e., cure rate over 90% for smear positive cases, and per case medication cost less than $10). Global TB incidence rate has fallen by an average of 1.5% per year since 2000, while TB death rate has dropped nearly half between 1990 and 2015. On the other side, TB remains a disease of poverty, and the NO 1 killers in infectious disease (1.4 million deaths and 10.4 million new cases in 2015), and growing threats from multi-drug resistant TB, and co-infections of HIV/TB and diabetes/TB. TB is a disease of poverty and heavily stigmatized in many cultures. This course will introduce TB from microbiological, clinical, public health and health policy perspectives. It will discuss TB pathology, epidemiology, diagnosis and treatment, TB programs, policies and practices both at local and global levels. We will also discuss social, ethical and health system issues of TB prevention and care.

HAD5778: Comparative Health Systems and Policy

Course Directors: Greg Marchidon, Xiaolin Wei & Sara Allin.

Each county’s health system and policies are largely shaped by historical, political, social and economic contexts; but in general, they face similar challenges such as rising expenditures, limited accessibility, poor patient responsiveness, limited coordination across the health continuum and public health and health system threats from both communicable and noncommunicable diseases. This comparative health systems and policy course is intended to capture the rapidly expanding field of comparative studies in health systems and policy. It will provide a comprehensive theoretical and methodological foundation to understand why we compare health systems in different countries or provinces within a country, and what we can learn from those comparisons. In the second part, the course will provide specific examples of health system and policy development in high-income countries as well as low- and middle income countries (LMICs). Although this is a taught course, the main requirement is to complete a major paper applying theoretical and methodological tools to a comparative health systems or comparative health policy case study including two or more jurisdictions (a province/state and/or country).

Other Teaching Responsibilities

• Supervising PhD and Masters students in IHPME and PHS
• CHL5005H (PhD stream): Introduction to Public Health Research