Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL HEALTH SCIENCES AND MANAGEMENT, cilt.9, sa.18, ss.75-82, 2023 (Hakemli Dergi)
In today’s ever-changing environment, health managers need to focus on promoting the health of populations. Therefore, they need a specialized understanding of epidemiology, as a requirement for population-based management. Epidemiology is acknowledged as an important component of undergraduate health management education, providing the knowledge and skills that health managers need in their professional lives. This cross-sectional descriptive study aims to assess the epidemiology courses in health management undergraduate programs in Turkey. The current curricula of 75 health management undergraduate programs, listed on the Program Atlas of the Higher Education Council, are reviewed through universities' official websites to profile the characteristics of epidemiology courses. Descriptive statistics was expressed as mean ± standard deviation for continuous variables, frequency and percentage values were used for categorical variables. 60 (80.0%) programs have epidemiology in their curricula. Yet the characteristics of these courses, such as their core/elective status, the semesters they are conducted, the weekly contact hours and ECTS credits, and the topics covered in the syllabus vary across programs. The findings reveal that there are variations regarding how epidemiology courses are conducted across health management undergraduate programs in Turkey. Apparently, this poses a challenge against all efforts to ensure the uniformity of the minimum core competencies among all health management program graduates; and although the Health Management National Core Education Program has been a great starting point towards standardization, there are further steps to be taken to improve the health management undergraduate curricula in Turkey.
Keywords: Epidemiology, Health management, Health management education, Health management undergraduate education, Health manager