The Lessons and The Legacy of the Pew Health Policy Program (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix B: Curriculum and Course Offerings
Appendix B: Curriculum and Course Offerings
Pages 301-330
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These offerings include computer instruction. Although there is no formal course in computers, time is set aside during the first three sessions of the program to teach students how to use key features of the university's mainframe system.
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This includes an understanding of how the course work relates to the qualifying examination, which they need to take to achieve candidacy, as well as to the dissertation, and how all of these elements are intended to serve the basic goals of the program. Another part of this introductory course consists of presentations and seminars by guest lecturers, which are inten(le(1 to expose students to a broad range of approaches to the analysis of health policy issues.
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Central to the Pew program's curriculum is a set of courses, each of which deals with the concepts and frameworks from a specific discipline or area and with the application of these to the analysis of health policy issues. To ensure that these courses are taught at the appropriate doctoral level and can devote the necessary time to health policy applications rather than to teaching of basic concepts, students must demonstrate mastery of the basics in three areas: economics, political science, and organizational behavior.
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This helpe(1 the faculty gear their lectures to the middle of the class rather than to the lowest denominator. The formal dissertation seminars
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Introduction to Health Policy and Research. This course gives students an understanding of the goals and structure of the Pew Doctoral Program in Health Policy and to the health policy field in general.
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This course aims to acquaint students with major analytical and methodological issues in understanding, criticizing, and designing formal research and evaluation programs in the health policy field, including the design and use of experiments and quasioxperiments; choice and operationaTization of measures and hypotheses in health policy studies; randomized clinical traits and their bearing on policy; methods and limits of technology assessment; and Delphi techniques and consensus metho(ls. Applied Statistics.
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From page 307... ...
This course offers analysis and description of selected issues, problems, and tasks in the financing, organization, and evaluation of personal health care services. Topics include social values and objectives, assessment of the need for health services, assessment of health care resources, features of system design that influence key aspects of performance, and assessing, monitoring, and enhancing the quality of care.
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From page 308... ...
Pew program curriculum consists of seminars, formal courses, faculty-fellow interaction and mentoring, research experiences, and field placement experiences in federal, state, or local government or in other policy-relevant organizations. Seminars and courses introduce fellows to a broad range of
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Defining and refining the curricula are complex and ongoing tasks that include formal course evaluations, a pane! discussion of each health policy seminar series, and interviews with former fellows.
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The Health Policy Seminar, Writing Seminar, and Journal Club are held weekly throughout the year (11 months) , and all fellows attend and participate in the seminars.
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What the Pew program aims to teach these fellows is how to apply those skills to the questions that policy makers need to answer. Therefore, the core health policy seminar focuses on policy questions and how research may help answer those questions.
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The goals of the writing seminar include recognizing goo(1 research (1esign and analysis and how to acquire the habits and practices that make for good scientific papers on relevant subjects; communicating with policy makers; being taught the skills of constructive review, that is, how to assess critically the work of others; being taught the absolute necessity for receiving and using criticism from colleagues; being taught the realities and subtleties of scientific and lay publication and the skills of constructive review; involving fellows in vigorous and informe debate with other fellows and faculty; inculcating the idea that there are important ethical principles throughout this process; and showing that open exchange of ideas and criticism is the best way to achieve good science and the best insurance against error and fraud. This seminar a(l(lresses the fact that although fellows are expecte(1 to publish papers, they have very little experience doing so.
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the changing role of the public sector, including an analysis of market and regulatory approaches to reform, and (2) the role of federal versus state and local governments in health care reform.
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Optional Course Work. Fellows are provided with several opportunities to take elective course work at both UCSF an the University of California at Berkeley, enabling them to structure a program that meets their individual training needs.
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the UCLA School of Public Health's basic curriculum trained students with the primary emphasis on the substantive issues in the public health field with speciaTiza tion in policy analysis methods and their applications. In addition to the individual institutional program cur ricuTum, doctoral students were required to take a core set of health policy workshops and apply their classroom stu(ly to ongoing or self-initiated health policy research projects.
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Therefore, the students were required to take a set of courses created specifically for this program, including Economics in Health Policy, Statistics, and Social Sciences in Health Policy, on top of the core health policy workshops mentioned above. As mentioned earlier, all students of health policy at the predoctoral, postdoctoral, or midcareer level enroll in this series of workshops.
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First, the government promotes the development of new technology through its investment in research. Second, as a major payer for health care services, the government pays for these innovations as new technologies become "accepted practice." There is no consensus, however, about the role that government should play in influencing the diffusion of new technologies.
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lty improvement. Health Care Financing, Competition, and Regulation (Texts: Reprints pertinent to topics)
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The course covers a range of topics in data analysis, statistics, and applied probability. Students learn to organize data, do exploratory data analyses, and fit statistical models (including regression, contingency tables, and distribution-free models)
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The first half of the course reviews the aspects of price theory and welfare economics that are most pertinent to health services research and policy analysis. The review illustrates how economics apply these concepts and tools to problems of demand for medical care, insurance, and supply of physicians and services.
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The curriculum during the second phase required students to take 14 courses, including 3 social science theory courses and 3 or more courses in research methods. The health specialization at the Heller School, which became required for all doctoral students interested in health policy, consisted of four required courses: Issues in National Health Policy, taught by Stanley Wallack and Stuart Altman; Health Economics, taught by Christine Bishop; Health Care Organization and Politics, taught by Deborah Stone; and Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Health Policy, taught by George Annas and other BU faculty.
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From the outset, the content of the core curriculum was interclisciplinary. The cloctoral program at the Heller School consists of course work in the basic social sciences, statistics anct research methods, policy analysis, economics, anc!
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Four problems had to be resolved: initial faculty concerns about the quality of an accelerated program, the need to change educational policy and curriculum rules, requiring an early dissertation seminar, and balancing a loose versus tight curriculum structure. At the outset of the Pew program, some Heller School faculty challenged the concept of a doctoral program that was trying to produce high-quaTity, academically oriented students in only 2 or 3 years.
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Although many Pew fellows took more than 3 years to finish, the average Pew fellow finished much faster than other Heller School doctoral students. Finally, the educational philosophy of Brandeis's social policy (loctoral program pose(1 a problem for the Pew fellows.
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Part I is an introduction to the concepts of power, conflict, and interest in political science. Part II examines the broad goals of social policy, such as equality or security, to understand their substantive meanings and how these ideals become strategic weapons in the conduct of political disputes.
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(lesigne(1 to introduce students to investigative tools and methodological approaches that would aid conceptual thinking (luring various stages of the research process. The seminar assists students in identifying research topics for their (dissertations by the en(1 of the first year of the program and provi(les psychological support for the challenging 2-year learning sequence.
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Research Methods. This course covers basic issues in research design beginning with an overview of conceptions of knowledge, theory design, the development of empirical research models, and basic strategies for developing knowledge through research.
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Other Courses. Also offered are the courses Qualitative Research, Survey Research, Evaluation Research, Applied Research, and Social Forecasting Methodology Race/Ethnicity, Gender and Health Care.
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This course will acquaint students with current information on the size and characteristics of the population at risk, the nature of service delivery systems, and methods of financing and managing existing services. The primary focus will be on aged individuals, but other populations with disabilities will be considered.
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