Health Sciences

This course examines how social and cultural background impact health access and outcomes. It discusses providing tailor-made care in a multicultural environment. Topics include: beliefs about health and disease in different cultural groups; social determinants of health; transcultural nursing; cultural competence; biomedical model vs social model; impact of sexist, racist, and lgbtq-phobic violence on individuals and communities; intersectionality.

In this course, students learn the foundations of neurobiology and neuropharmacology as it relates to stress, trauma, and mental illness. Topics include, for example, the impact of stress on epigenetics and the length of the telomeres causing early aging, the debate of whether genetic or environmental factors shape our mental health and contribute to mental illness, and the different approaches that mitigate the negative impact of stress on brain function.

This course includes the basic concepts and theories of trauma, basic skills of trauma treatment, assessment of the condition of trauma, organization and management system of integrated treatment, complications of various traumas, cardiopulmonary resuscitation technology, and trauma hemostasis bandaging fixed transportation technology.

Functional foods provide health benefits beyond our basic nutritional requirements. The course examines the efficacy of functional foods in human health and their possible application in disease prevention. Students learn the basic concepts of diseases, functional foods with health-promoting effects, and the mechanism of how food can affect human health. The course also covers prebiotics and probiotics, and food compounds and safety.

The undergraduate research program places students in research opportunites to conduct indpendent research under the supervision of a Chinese University of Hong Kong faculty. Students are expected to spend approximately 15 to 20 hours per week in independent research as well as attend lectures and labs.

In a globalizing world, contemporary debates around health, illness, and well-being are not only concerned with the individual, but include a consideration of the ways that social and political contexts shape health. This course gives an outline of the global context of health and disease and then addresses a selection of health challenges by focusing on a different contemporary topic each week. These topics change in order to keep up-to-date with changing patterns of disease and global health concerns but example topics for the course include subject areas as diverse as long term conditions in a global world, communicable and non-communicable diseases, organ transplantation, telemedicine, and people trafficking. The complexities and contradictions of contemporary issues of health in a globalized world are explored, and students are encouraged to develop a critical and self-directed approach to each topic. 

This course examines the complex issues that surround drug development in society. It covers the history and current methods of drug development, including the discovery and development stages, regulatory review, market authorization, and post-market activities until the drug is no longer on the market.

This course familiarizes students with: the epidemiology of mortality and disease; the determinants of health; the ageing of society and its implications for medical care; the unequal distribution of health; moral issues in public health; the economics of public health; health systems analysis; public health genomics; markets and public health; public health disasters. Students become familiar with public policymaking, including: the various components of public policy (values, objectives, instruments, policy paradigm); the concept of the policy cycle (problem recognition and definition, agenda building, policy formation, policy implementation, policy evaluation and feedback); theoretical approaches of public policy making (rational model, political model, institutionalist model); stakeholder and policy community analysis; types of state-society relationships (elitist model, pluralist model, corporatist model, regulatory agency model, communitarian model); the role of power in public policymaking.

Health Data Science is an area that combines scientific inquiry, statistical knowledge, substantive expertise, and computer programming in the area of healthcare and biomedicine. Students are introduced to fundamental data analytic tools and techniques, and learn how to use specialized software to analyze real-world health data.