Health Promotion

During the first period you are invited 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 will uncover why behaviours and environments 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.

During this period, 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 behaviours and environmental conditions. Next, you will select the most suitable evidence-based methods for changing behaviours 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 engage with priority populations and stakeholders to ensure your solutions are realistic, appealing, and effective.

In this period, you will apply and deepen your knowledge and skills acquired in previous courses to design ethically sound and inclusive health promotion research. You will be trained to critically analyse and synthesize relevant scientific literature, formulate research questions, and develop a detailed understanding of research methodologies relevant to a selected health promotion topic. Finally, you will 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.

During this period, you will acquire a comprehensive foundation in implementation science, focusing on the dissemination, adoption, delivery, sustainability, upscaling, adaptation, and de-implementation of interventions. 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 settings.

During this final period, you will conduct independent health promotion research under academic supervision, applying and integrating the knowledge and skills you have gained throughout the programme. You will implement your research proposal by applying appropriate methods for data collection and analysis, interpreting findings, and deriving implications for research, policy, and practice. You will also communicate your research results to diverse audiences, including scientific peers, professional stakeholders, and citizens. This period emphasizes critical reflection on methodological, theoretical, and ethical choices and collaboration within research teams and with other stakeholders.