A Preview of Fall 2023 Classes

Our health is essential now more than ever. Discover these Summer 2023 courses that revolve around several facets of our living health.

HLTH 385-8 | Embodiment of Health

This course investigates the social, cultural, medical, and personal considerations of health and how various social factors influence experiences of health, illness, and disability. Students will gain a vital understanding of how societal structures, meanings, and practices shape health.

Taught by: Andrea Fitzroy

HLTH 385-6 | Personalizing Nutrition

What determines if a diet is optimal, or promotes a nutritional imbalance that affects health? This hands-on course will explore techniques and considerations for collecting and using dietary, anthropometric, biochemical, and clinical data to evaluate nutrition status of individuals and groups.

Taught by: Myra Woodworth-Hobbs

HLTH 350 | Who Decides the World's Diet?

How do you design public health programs so they are effective and sustainable? In this course, we will explore four major steps in program design: planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, using food fortification (the addition of micronutrients to foods while they are being processed) as a model intervention.

Taught by: Helena Pachón, PhD, MPH

HLTH 373 | Delivering Health

This course provides an overview of key parts of the health care delivery system and their ability to deliver health. We will focus on the role of insurance, the government-sponsored Medicare and Medicaid programs, and the hospital and mental health sectors. We will analyze the organization of and financing mechanisms for these sectors and the incentives faced by health care providers in terms of the volume and type of services they provide. We will also examine consumer access barriers, particularly those of disadvantaged groups, to seeing care. We will identify how each sector attempts to measure its impact on individual's health, whether these measures are meaningful and what they indicate about sector performance.

Practical examples will be explored throughout the semester, such as how does the Medicaid program deliver mental health services to extremely vulnerable and marginalized populations. We will also have lectures provided by experts in the field, such as the Director of Georgia Families, Amerigroup Inc. and physician practice managers.

Taught by: Victoria Phillips

HLTH 431 | Stigma & Health

This course explores the sociocultural process of stigma as a fundamental determinant of health that shapes a wide range of health conditions and illness experiences. As situated within the context of biomedicine, we closely consider ways in which stigma produces illness (manifested as uneven patterns of disease at the population level), as well as ways in which illness produces stigma (whereby people experiencing illness become the targets of exclusion). Specific areas of focus include non-normative body appearance, impaired mobility, chronic disease, mental health, and reproductive health. Toward the end of the course, we examine the effectiveness of various anti-stigma interventions at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional/structural levels.

Taught by: Sydney Spangler