The Revised Health Promotion Curriculum

Dennis will start as programme coordinator for the Master in Health Promotion in September. A significant moment, because as the current vice coordinator, he is jointly responsible for the curriculum revision. In his new role, Dennis will immediately experience firsthand what he and the core and development teams have created over the past two years. “We assembled those teams in a multidisciplinary way to enable us to work as broadly as possible. To maintain a direct line to the professional field, we asked Kim, a recent graduate of the master’s programme with professional experience, to collaborate on the revision.”

A revision starts with a blueprint, which can be compared to a strategic plan in which the content of the revision is explained. To develop this in a substantiated manner, the core team based its work on literature studies and interviews. “We conducted interviews with students, professionals, alumni and colleagues from other programmes. We also learned a lot from colleagues in the Master in Healthcare Policy, Innovation and Management, who recently implemented a similar revision. We were truly impressed by their approach.”

According to Dennis and Kim, there were several reasons for the curriculum revision. “An imbalance had emerged between individual behavioural change and the role of the environment. While our Health Promotion department is fully aware of the growing importance of the role of our living environment. At the same time, the faculty is moving towards competency-based education. We also received feedback from our student evaluation panels that the link with practice could be strengthened.”

Together, these factors provided the starting signal for the curriculum revision. From the outset, the choice was made for competency-based education. “Our characteristic Problem-Based Learning approach had already distanced itself from traditional education, which focuses primarily on the reproduction of knowledge. Competency-based education is even closer to the professional field and gives students roles and competencies that they must fulfil throughout the year by working on Authentic Professional Tasks, often together with fellow students.”

The blueprint for the renewed curriculum was approved in 2025. Subsequently, development teams were assembled to further define the competencies and Authentic Professional Tasks (APT). “We have four roles – as Expert, Investigator, Professional, and Ally & Advocate.” Each role has three competencies that students must meet. In the Expert role, for example, students must be able to demonstrate competence in the planned and systematic approach to health problems, while in the Ally & Advocate role, students must be able to be reflective and sensitive regarding their own work and that of others.

The Authentic Professional Tasks are realistic cases from (public) healthcare that provide students with a general structure for an assignment, but also stimulate self-directed and contextualised learning. “If, for example, an APT concerns health challenges within a school district, the student can still choose whether the assignment focuses on a specific age group or on the teachers. In other cases, the choice may lie in which health challenge needs to be addressed in an APT. In this way, we also partly ensure personalised learning.”

“In the professional field, your competencies are not assessed every eight weeks using grades. It takes time to develop competencies, and you will be better at one competency than another. That is all part of the learning process.” With this in mind, Health Promotion has adopted programmatic assessment. Students must independently track their progress throughout the year in PebblePad, the digital portfolio, and they no longer receive traditional grades for tests or final assignments. “We help students reflect on their progress and become aware of the learning process by providing them with narrative feedback whenever a competency is assessed. We also do this through individual coaching within a longitudinal Competency Development Track.”

The development teams are busy with the final details to prepare everything as well as possible for the cohort starting in 2026-2027. When Dennis and Kim compare the current cohort with the new students, they see a few nuanced differences: “The new cohort will have the entire year to work on their competencies, and hopefully that helps them better understand what they enjoy doing and what they don't. We ensure that students graduate as professionals, ready to put their talents to work and possess a set of competencies they can apply in any future assignment.”

Text: Ruben Beeckman

Photography: Jonathan Vos