Public and Environmental Health Sciences MSc

Food Safety and Control
(30 credits)

Consideration of all measures needed to ensure the safety and wholesomeness of food at all stages from growth, through production, manufacture and retail until it reaches the consumer.

Food Safety control is a larger module because it also contains important cross-cutting Public and Environmental Health issues in more detail including outbreaks, food and nutrition, allergens, hazard analysis and critical control point assessment. It also covers microbiology and epidemiology.

Occupational Health and Safety
(20 credits)

This module enables students to achieve a systematic and critical understanding of the interaction between work, health and well-being and apply appropriate control mechanisms and strategies. Skills of communication and judgement on occupational health, safety and wellbeing factors are covered. Also, the systematic understanding of the control mechanisms by which occupational hazards can be managed are included. Important elements of safety culture and management are also covered.

Environmental Protection and Climate Change
(20 credits)

This module will develop students' appreciation of key concepts that link environmental science, ecology, pollution of the environment and human health and wellbeing. They will develop an understanding of the scientific, technical, socio-economic, political and legal factors which influence climate change, environmental quality and safety and the mechanisms and partnership strategies available to effect change. Students will also gain an understanding of the sources, modes of transport and effects of pollution; and how pollution may be controlled in order to protect human health and the environment.

Health Protection
(10 credits)

This module provides the foundation knowledge and skills needed for engagement in health protection and health improvement. It will examine communicable disease surveillance and there will be epidemiological studies for infectious diseases and environmental epidemiology related to exposures from pollution sources. It will also include an insight into the work of public health including effective projects and partnerships.

Public Health Integration (International)
(20 credits)

The aim of the module is for students to integrate their acquired public and environmental health knowledge across intervention areas associated with Dahlgren and Whitehead’s 1992 conceptualisation of the determinants of health and well-being. This includes the ability to demonstrate, how, a range of measures can be used to maximise the outcome for a given situation and to be able to demonstrate the complexity of the interaction of the determinants of health, and how the use of evidence based practice and reflective practice supports an effective approach. This module links closely with the Health Protection module.

Chemical and Biological Incident Management
(20 credits)

The objectives of this module are to enable students to understand the causes of chemical and biological incidents; introduce methods of assessing the impacts of incidents; and develop a practical approach to managing and solving problems caused by chemical and biological incidents.

Dissertation
(60 credits)

This module will provide students with the underpinning skills necessary for them to successfully undertake an MSc research dissertation. Students will gain an understanding of processes needed to plan, implement and evaluate a research-based study. In particular there will be sessions looking at hypothesis and research question generation, survey design, sampling strategies, qualitative approaches, literature searching and evaluation, and an introduction to some basic statistical techniques. Students will be expected to formulate their project ideas and to write their research protocols.

An in-depth project will be submitted in the form of a dissertation or research paper. Research can use a variety of methods, including mixed approaches.