Child Health Policy

Catalog description

Child Health Policy is a 3-credit, interdisciplinary course that will address how policy affects child health and influences parental decision-making over their children's health, as well as how policy influences, and is influenced by, child-serving systems (e.g., public health, education, juvenile justice). The course will cover how child health policy is developed, implemented, evaluated, and influenced as well as the myriad of ways health policy may impact seemingly unrelated policy discussions and decisions. As an interdisciplinary course, students will study how law and medicine (specifically, child health) intersect, hearing from a variety of perspectives on this intersection from experts, as broadly defined (lawyers, advocates, case workers, health professionals, academics, and families themselves). Further, with the expectation that lecturers will discuss the interrelation between law, medicine, and advocacy in their respective fields, so too will it be expected that students reflect on at least two of these (law, medicine, advocacy) in their work (i.e., discussion, journals, presentations, papers). The course's multi-disciplinary approach, and student enrollment, will contribute to a fuller view of child health policy: students gain the perspective of varied disciplines and how expertise from these disciplines might be joined to enhance effectiveness of health policy.