Introduction to Population Health and Community-Oriented Primary Care

This course is the first Population Health course. Its initial goal is to explore population health and its importance for medicine as it provides students with opportunities to understand health and disease beyond the narrowly defined biomedical realm. Both historical and current perspectives will be presented. Simultaneously, students will engage in the practice of self-reflection using the techniques of Narrative Medicine to become increasingly aware of the lens they bring to bear on this study of individual and public health. Students will attend lectures and engage in exercises that increase their knowledge of social determinants of disease and health outcomes as well as diverse ways in which different populations explain those experiences of health. Students will study theoretical and applied work from the fields of sociology, anthropology, and psychology to understand the indices of class, communities, social mobility, and culture. Intervention approaches will focus on structural interventions and community and political action. Finally students will put all of this together by exploring the relationship between socio-economics, culture and health by gathering individual stories of illness that reflect these greater social determinants, and reflecting upon the experience of witnessing all these narratives in broad and narrow perspectives at once.