Trans4mPH

The "Transformative Competency-Based Public Health Education for Professional Employability in Bangladesh's Health Sector (Trans4m-PH)" project is a 3-year (2019-22) Erasmus+ project funded by the European Commission. The aim of the project is to design and offer indigenous competency based public health curricula which sustain professional employability in Bangladesh’s health sector.

The objective of the project is to upgrade priority public health courses to Competency-Based Public Health Curricula in 3 Bangladeshi Public Health Higher Education providers: BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University (BRAC JPGSPH); Asian University for Women (AUW); and Independent University, Bangladesh (ICCCAD-IUB). The Project’s European capacity-building technical partners are Maastricht University (UM), Netherlands and Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, United Kingdom. BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University is the Lead Coordinator in the project.

BRAC JPGSPH, ICCCAD-IUB and AUW identified systemic challenges to their Public Health Curricula in the interrelated areas of course structure and faculties with less or no orientation with competency based teaching methodologies. In encountering faculty-centered, didactic lecture, rote-learning classrooms, students graduate without the competency based skills required in their professional lives. The partners recognize the economic imperative for Higher Education transformation to develop successive generations of professionals to positively impact the public health sector. Partners will ultimately invigorate their respective mandates of educational excellence, while averting the impending quality crisis across the Higher Education sector.

This model must be systemically redesigned around the student learner’s competency development by introducing the following four interdependent components in their academic learning endeavour:

1. Public Health Competency-based Curriculum
2. Public Health Learning Methodologies
3. Faculty Facilitator Development
4. Faculty Professional Skills Training

BRAC JPGSPH will redesign the curricula of three modules from their Master of Public Health (MPH) Programme to make it student centric and competency based and the faculty will receive training for teaching these modules.

 

Year 1 (2019)
ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO PUBLIC HEALTH (MPH 512)
Team Members: AKM Mazharul Islam (Adjunct Professor), Farhana Alam (Course Coordinator) and Ishrat Jahan (Teaching Fellow)
Description of Module:
The ‘Anthropological Approaches to Public Health’ is a week long course scheduled as the 2nd course of the yearlong master’s programme. The objective is to orient students to the diversity of lived experiences and provide an overall understanding of the ground realities of communities which they will be serving as future public health professionals. Through this course, students critically explore how elementary cultural, political and socio-economic aspects within the contemporary developing world shape health determinants. The course takes on a solution centric approach whereby the sessions are designed around working with communities and the development of innovative small scale solutions, which engage students in learning by doing. We believe it is imperative to develop skills that allow public health professionals to understand the importance of and assess how health determinants/needs encompass factors beyond the biomedical. This is critical to inform and shape design, implementation and impact of sustainable health services and systems in an ever-changing world.

Year 2 (2020)
GENDER, SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND RIGHTS (MPH 660)
Team Members: Nadia Farnaz and Wafa Alam (Teaching Fellow)
Description of Module:
This module will allow students to acquire a broad perspective on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) life cycle of adolescents girls and women; and acquire a layered understanding of the larger factors that shape their lives, their sexual and reproductive health, emotional and mental well-being. The course emphasizes experiential learning with facilitated discussions on SRHR, and how personal determinants of health impact as much as gender, social and structural factors, affecting one’s expectations, choices, constraints and decisions. The module will also discuss the SRHR needs and experiences of men, marginalised communities, including invisible sexualities (eg sex workers, transgender individuals) and the challenges they face from families, communities and in programmes. The students will initially visit the urban low-income community to understand specific SRHR issues faced by adolescent girls, young women and pregnant women/mothers from the lens of the community, followed by interactive and participatory classroom activities such as facilitated discussions, case study, gallery walk, role plays, presentation and feedback session etc. where learners will have an in-depth understanding of the SRHR concepts. Finally, through a synthesis session the students will try to compile and relate their learnings from the community and classroom. The second part of the course requires students to undertake an experiential field-based project on developing solutions to address Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) in two government Upazila Health Complex (UHC)s in rural Bangladesh. The immersive field work in this module helps students identify and analyze a public health problem, and gets students thinking about simple and feasible community centric solutions addressing the various aspects of health.

 

Year 3 (2021)
INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC HEALTH: ITS PURPOSE, VALUES AND PRACTICE (MPH 501)
Team Members: Proloy Barua, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, Adeepto Intisar Ahmed, Kazi Faria Islam and Nibedita Sarkar
Description of Module:
This course introduces the vision, values and community-centred ethos of 21st century developing country public health needs, and are introduced to a holistic model of health, with personal health as a critical dimension of public health and its complementarity with social dimensions of health. There is intensive urban and rural public health context learning and groups of students work to find solutions to public health problems.

The module is currently being redesigned and the faculty are receiving training. The details will be updated soon.