Health Inequality: Understanding the Geographies of Life and Death

Catalog description

This course provides an introduction to the concepts, measurement and study of health and health inequality across geographic scales from the international to the local scale, and to study health inequality in diverse contexts (including urban and rural; historical and contemporary). The lectures will cover the nature, causes and consequence of health inequality, temporal trends and spatial patterns in health indicators, and examine associations between socioeconomic and environmental factors and health. The emphasis will be on easily measured and available primary health indicators such as mortality and morbidity, communicable and non-communicable disease as well as mental health. The lab component of the course will focus on finding, critiquing, interpreting and presenting health-related data and will introduce students to fundamental concepts and expand their skill set in both basic statistics (numerical and graphical skills) and mapping (geographic visualization skills). At the end of the course the students will be more familiar with measures of human health and a variety of international and US data resources. The lecture component begins with focus on describing and understanding past, present and future patterns and trends in human health, examining these at the global, national (US), regional (Appalachia) and local (Pennsylvania) scales. The second half of the course includes lectures on the social determinants of health, the ways in which the legal landscape and direct and indirect discriminatory practices can influence health and wellbeing (e.g., around reproductive health, sexuality, and risk-taking behaviors), mental health, and the geographies of access to resources and the geography of exposure to risks. The final lecture will discuss 21st century "Global" health challenges. The parallel lecture and labs provide opportunities for practical learning. The labs are designed to expose students to the use of health data, geographic information systems and basic spatial analysis tools providing them with skills that help them to accurately summarize and report data on health outcomes. Students will learn how to find, critique and use data appropriately to measure and map health outcomes. The labs will be based on sample data sets and case studies that draw on the use and interpretation of a variety of data sets, international, national, and sub-national. Towards the end of the course, students will generate their own community health case study based on the skills they have used during the course.