Language
  • English
Format
  • Full time
  • Part time
Start date
  • September
Location
  • Maastricht
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Health Education and Promotion

Learn to understand (un)healthy behaviour and how environments can influence health. This master’s equips you with the tools to change behaviours for better health. You'll design, implement, and evaluate health interventions using Intervention Mapping.

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Why this programme

Our world is facing serious problems such as climate change and increasing poverty and inequality. Ensuring health and well-being is complex, which makes promoting them fundamental. The starting point to promote health is human behaviour and the environments in which that behaviour occurs. In this programme, we focus on understanding and changing behaviours that contribute to health and well-being. Health education enables people to increase control over and improve their health by, for example, developing skills and capabilities. Health promotion ensures that environments, communities, and policies are beneficial to health and well-being.

You are equipped with important tools for understanding human behaviour and leveraging a comprehensive planned and systematic approach to the development, implementation and evaluation of health-promoting interventions. 

This programme is for you if:

  • you have a keen interest in understanding (un)healthy behaviours and how environments impact health;
  • you are passionate about developing health-promoting interventions and policies;
  • you want to make an impact and address complex societal challenges and the wicked problems we face in our current society.

Intervention Mapping

Maastricht University is a world-renowned expertise centre for Intervention Mapping, which is the most comprehensive approach for changing behaviours and environments for health. By learning the ins and outs of Intervention Mapping, the Health Education and Promotion programme aids you in:

  • acquiring a thorough understanding of why people engage in (un)healthy behaviours;
  • developing interventions and policies to promote healthy behaviours and beneficial environmental conditions;
  • ensuring adequate implementation of health education and promotion interventions;
  • executing rigorous evaluations of the process, effect, and outcomes of (existing) interventions and policies.

A socio-ecological approach

Health behaviours do not happen in a vacuum. They are influenced by, and in turn influence, the environment in which they occur. This is the fundament of a socio-ecological approach to understanding and changing behaviour and promoting health. As a future health promotor, you learn about a wide range of determinants of health at various levels – from the intrapersonal level through to the community, organisational, and societal levels. You gain a deep and unprejudiced understanding of a wide range of determinants from individual perceptions and motives to the physical, social, and economic environments in which people live. The continuous changes in, and interactions, between these aspects are part of the complexity that we as health promotors embrace.

Our focus on both theory and practice

Health Education and Promotion has a strong focus on both theory and practice. Each course has substantive content complemented by practice-based skills training. This means that you learn how to formulate communication strategies and how to develop, implement, and evaluate health promotion interventions. Within the Health Education and Promotion master’s programme, we do not focus on one specific health problem or behaviour specifically. Rather, you have the freedom to engage with the health promotion topics that interest you most and are taught the skills to address those. With practical skills training embedded in each course and possibilities to conduct the research for your master’s thesis in various (practical and academic) organisations, this programme provides you with the theoretical, practical and intercultural toolbox you need to launch your career.

The strengths of our faculty