COVID-19 has brought to the world’s attention the central role that population health plays in all our lives. It has opened up the opportunity to re-envision how we think about and teach about health as part of health professions education.
Population health is the emerging discipline that brings together public health, clinical health care, plus health administration and policy to improve the health of the population. To help make this happen, Jones & Bartlett Learning has developed the Population Health Primer series. Primers are short texts which can be used alone or bundled with other Jones & Bartlett Learning texts to allow population health to reach a wide audience as part of existing course work.
The Population Health series builds on the population health expectations of the Clinical Prevention and Population Health framework developed by representatives of health professions educational associations including nursing, physician assistants, pharmacy, medicine, and public health. The Clinical Prevention and Population Health framework is rapidly becoming a component of accreditation of health professions programs.
Population Health: A Primer, the first Primer in the series, has been designed to provide an overview of the emerging field of population health. Units on the Population Perspective, Systems-Thinking & Systems-Doing, as well as Tools of Population Health provide the basic content and concepts. Interactive digital exercises on Determinants of Health plus Systems-thinking and Systems-Doing present and illustrate basic principles of population health.
Additional Primers on Biostatistics for Population Health as well as the forthcoming Health Information Systems for Population Health (available in Spring 2021) provide key skills that all health professionals need to implement population health using state-of-the-art methods for dealing with data and data systems.
The Population Health series will also include three primers designed to apply these principles and skills to complex population health problems. Climate Change and Population Health tackle the increasingly important knowledge, communications, and policy issues that surround climate change and health.
Opioids and Population Health addresses the population health aspects of the ongoing epidemic which continues to take the lives of the young and not so young. Global Population Health (available in fall 2021) will provide a broad overview of the problems of global health and provided concrete ways that they can be addressed.
Last but not least is COVID-19, the ultimate population health problem.COVID-19 Global Lessons Learned is a set of seven interactive case studies providing a comprehensive overview of the COVID-19 pandemic from a population health perspective. Each case starts with an extended case study and takes a question/answer approach. The case studies utilize videos, websites, and PDFs. They include discussion questions as well as objective questions and answers. A test bank plus recommendations for using the discussion questions are provided to faculty.
Clinical Course of COVID-19, Epidemiology of COVID-19, and Testing for COVID-19 are currently available for use in fall 2020. They provide students with “what you need to know to understand the pandemic”. Population Prevention & COVID-19, Treatment of COVID-19, and Health Policy, Communications & COVID-19 will be available in mid-October 2020 for use in January 2021. These case studies focus on the responses to COVID-19. These six case studies will be updated for use in the spring and fall of 2021, and a seventh and final case study on Lessons Learned from COVID-19 will be available in October 2021.
COVID-19 Global Lessons Learned: Interactive Case Studies are offered at no additional charge (excluding inclusive access) when adopted with a Population Health Primer or other Jones & Bartlett Learning text. This approach is designed to allow the case studies to reach the broad audience intended for the Population Health series.
As COVID-19 fades into history, the importance of population health can only increase. The need for a population health framework, key population skills, and application to major health problems from climate change and population health to the opioid crisis and population health can only increase in the years to come. The Population Health series will be there to help make that happen.
For more information on the Jones & Bartlett Learning Population Health series visit the Population Health series website.
About the Author
Richard K. Riegelman, MD, MPH, PhD is Professor of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Health Policy, and Founding Dean of the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health in Washington, DC. He is the author of Public Health 101, Third Edition, Population Health: A Primer, and COVID-19 Global Lesson Learned