Health Promotion

This first period invites you to explore the many complex problems that influence our health and wellbeing. You’ll start by learning how to investigate these influences in a structured and systematic way through a comprehensive needs and assets assessment. For this aim, you will bring together diverse data sources, apply theoretical frameworks, and collaborate with stakeholders and communities to identify priorities for action. Building on these insights, you’ll uncover why behaviours, environments, and policies are the way they are — and how they impact health and well-being. By strengthening your analytical and critical skills, you’ll learn to prioritise key factors and define clear programme goals for future health promotion efforts. 

In this course, you will learn how to systematically design and improve health promotion interventions that change behaviour and environments. You will start by uncovering the key determinants that drive behaviour and environmental conditions. Next, you will select the most suitable evidence-based methods for changing behaviour and environments, and operationalise them for real-world settings. Additionally, you will optimise an existing intervention by identifying what can be improved (using real-world data) and pilot-testing your own ideas. Along the way, you will actively engage with priority populations and stakeholders to ensure your solutions are realistic, appealing, and effective.

In this course, you apply and deepen the knowledge and skills acquired in previous courses to design ethically sound and inclusive health promotion research. You critically analyse and synthesise relevant scientific literature, formulate research questions, and develop a detailed understanding of research methodologies relevant to a selected health promotion topic. You create a coherent research proposal and critically reflect on methodological, theoretical, and ethical considerations, preparing you for the subsequent, more independent phase of conducting research. 

The courses in this period provide a comprehensive foundation in implementation science, focusing on the dissemination, adoption, delivery, sustainability, upscaling, adaptation, and de-implementation of interventions in real-word settings. You will learn to systematically select and apply implementation frameworks and theories, conduct stakeholder analyses, and develop and adapt implementation plans. The courses emphasise the importance of maintaining interventions’ core components, while integrating diverse forms of evidence and addressing the complexity and dynamics of real-world systems. You will learn to engage with various stakeholders while navigating and managing competing values (e.g. balancing between theory and practice), select, apply, and evaluate implementation strategies, communicate your findings to both academic and non-academic audiences, and lead evidence-based implementation efforts across diverse settings. 

In this course, you conduct independent health promotion research under academic supervision, applying and integrating knowledge and skills gained throughout the programme. You implement an individually developed research proposal by applying appropriate methods for data collection and analysis, interpreting findings, and deriving implications for research, policy, and practice. You communicate results to diverse audiences, including scientific peers, professional stakeholders, and the general public. The course emphasises critical reflection on methodological, theoretical, and ethical choices and collaboration within research teams and with other stakeholders.