Health Policy and Management

The Department of Health Policy and Management (HPM) helps students acquire the knowledge needed to understand and improve public health challenges domestically and globally. With the recent passage of the health care reform package, HPM faculty have rededicated themselves to training the next generation of leadership to take on the new challenges associated with this reform.  Issues such as prevention, health care payment, quality of health care, and health insurance exchanges will require academics and practitioners at all levels to be prepared with state-of-the-art, cutting edge training. 

Interdisciplinary in both philosophy and content, the courses of the Department of HPM are designed to provide students with a comprehensive background in the conceptual and analytical knowledge necessary to understand and improve health status and health services delivery. The orientation of the courses taught in the department aligns academic knowledge with an applied perspective.

It is this combination of interdisciplinary work and the application of rigorous knowledge to complicated issues in health care that makes a dual MA-Bioethics/MPH a natural fit with the program in Health Policy. Many of the issues with which bioethicists address require major policy creation, revision, and implementation at a variety of levels. Consider efforts to streamline end-of-life care, or innovative approaches to improving access to health care in general. Whether large or small, policy initiatives in healthcare inevitably have an ethical component, and knowing how to identify, assess, and address ethical issues as they arise in policy creation and revision will be essential skills for anyone who plans to work in this field.

Visit the Department of Health Policy and Management website

Proposed Curriculum

As HPM has several educational partnerships already, their curriculum for students who pursue dual degrees is established. Students will complete their first year of coursework at Rollins and their second year at the Center for Ethics.

Students will be challenged to consider continually how the information and methodology from one discipline intersects with the other. Through conversations in class and careful selection of class projects, dual degree students will enhance their capacities for interdisciplinary work by ensuring a rigorous evaluation of the intersection of these two disciplines. In fact, it is possible that students will return to the site of their MPH practicum to complete their MA-Bioethics practicum, the second time approaching the relevant issues or program from the perspective of bioethics instead of public health policy or practice. Regardless, the connections for students will be deep and lasting for students in the HPM program.

All students in the dual MA-Bioethics/MPH Program are automatically put on the examination track for the MA-Bioethics culminating experience.

A typical student course would resemble what is listed in Table 6.

As Tables 6 demonstrates, students are expected to be able to complete this dual degree program in 2 calendar years. Regardless, students will have a maximum of 5 years to complete both programs, consistent with the Laney Graduate School Graduate Handbook.