Health Promotion & Disease Prevention Track

The Health Promotion & Disease Prevention track builds on the long and rich tradition of Mount Sinai’s collaboration with the East Harlem community in the promotion of health and the prevention of disease. Students who pursue the Heath Promotion & Disease Prevention Specialty Track will learn how to improve the public’s health by working with individuals and their communities. This track emphasizes community level interventions through a curriculum developed to reflect the World Health Organization’s 1986 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion: “Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.” Students in this track achieve the competencies necessary to assist communities in effective action in setting priorities, making decisions, planning strategies and implementing them to achieve better health. At the heart of this process is the empowerment of communities, their ownership and control of their own endeavors and destinies.

Additionally, this track looks at individual behavior as a major determinant of health and helps students develop into public health practitioners capable of influencing social norms that provide a framework for health promotion and disease prevention across life stages. Students in this track learn how to collaborate with agencies, institutions and community-based organizations that influence the social determinants of health to foster the development and implementation of policy and environmental strategies that enable healthy individual behaviors. Topics addressed include nutrition and physical activity, chronic disease prevention and control, health literacy, health communications, injury control and prevention, aging/health and disabilities, men's health and women's health, as well as children’s health. Particular emphasis is placed on the elimination of disparities in health outcomes.

Examples of projects undertaken in this track over the past few years include: working on accurately recording all pediatric vaccinations given in New York City through collaboration with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; creating educational tools and evaluating effectiveness of those tools in a population of HIV/hepatitis C infected substance abusers; working to establish an Arab-American clinic at Mount Sinai; developing an obesity education program for the East Harlem community.

• Apply behavioral or social science theory in the development, implementation, or evaluation of health promotion interventions.

• Effect programmatic change at individual, community, or policy level.

• Synthesize surveillance data to identify sources of health disparities.

• Describe the health, legal, social or political implications of policy alternatives.

• Examine the psychosocial and environmental causes of health disparities in the implementation, or evaluation of health promotion or intervention programs.

Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Track Requirements and Electives

Course Number and Title	Credits
MPH0002 Public Health Surveillance	3
MPH0210 Health & Literacy: Improving Health Communication Efforts	3
MPH0216 Health Promotion Strategies	3
MPH0007 Public Health Policy, Medicine & Social Justice*	3
MPH0012 Public Health Lab*	3
MPH0014 Program Planning*	3
MPH0015 History of Public Health in America*	3
MPH0016 LGB/TGD/Q+ Health: Research, Policies and Best Practices*	3
MPH0705 Racism and Public Health in the United States*	3
MPH0211 Substance Use & Public Health*	2
MPH0212 Life Cycle of Violence: Implications for Public Health*	2
MPH0215 Emerging Issues: Women Sex & Reproductive Health and Rights*	2
MPH0305 Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods*	3
MPH0203 Introduction to Medical Anthropology*	3
Students may choose other additional electives from across Tracks	variable

*Elective Options