Public Health and Epidemiology

1.Upon successful completion of the course, the students will: • define the concept of health and list the main groups of health determinants; • formulate practical and scientific tasks of the public health discipline; • classify and describe the levels of disease prevention and define basic principles of screening; • describe objectives of health promotion; • state historic development of the concept of epidemiology and its current understanding; • formulate the concept of evidence-based health care; • identify and interpret causal factors, risk factors of diseases and health in the frame of multi-factorial theory; • define principles to measure health-related events and states; • describe health information types, their main sources, and factors influencing their quality; • explain measures of test sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values; • explain the relationship between test sensitivity and specificity as illustrated by the ROC curve; • classify the main designs of epidemiological studies and list their advantages and limitations; • explain the concepts of confounding and bias.

1.The students will be able to: • differentiate causal and non-causal associations of factors and health events; • describe and give examples of disease prevention and health promotion; • calculate measures of health events and states; • differentiate crude, specific and standardized rates; • differentiate and compare electronic databases for the selection of health information; • calculate test sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values; • appraise the validity of epidemiological studies corresponding to the study designs; • calculate measures of association.

1.Upon successful completion of the course the students will: • justify the necessity of empirical data for practice of public health and its use to define and solve public health problems; • justify the need of health promotion and disease prevention; • elucidate prior public health problems by using quantitative empirical data; • critically choose health measures for studies of health problems; • critically judge health information depending on its source and taking into account the evidence; • compare research results by their design and measures of association used.