SAN DIEGO – A new Howard University program offering a master's degree in public health aims to train leaders who will help eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health.
The degree program is the first to focus on health disparities using a multidisciplinary team approach, Mohammad N. Akhter, M.D., said at the annual meeting of the National Medical Association.
“Leadership is very important because leadership is all about setting the priorities. If you are a leader, you are in a position where you can change our policies, you can change the system,” said Dr. Akhter of the university in Washington.
Currently, few public health leaders are members of racial and ethnic minorities. “For us, this is the next battle of the civil rights movement,” he said.
The new degree option is the fastest-moving program in the university's history, he said.
After the deans of all 15 schools at the university met in November 2003 and backed the new M.P.H. program, a 29-member public health council was formed from faculty, community leaders, representatives of the city's health department, foundations, and others to flesh out the program and its policies.
The program has accepted 22 students from 18 different disciplines for the first class, out of more than 100 applicants. Students were warned that they would have to be fighters in this field; jobs are not waiting for them to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities, Dr. Akhter said.
Preference is given to applicants who already hold advanced degrees (M.D., D.D.S., Pharm.D., Ph.D., and the like) or who have an undergraduate degree and at least 2 years of fieldwork in public health. Courses are held at night so that students can continue their jobs if desired. The degree could be obtained in 2 years, Dr. Akhter said.
The program has no dedicated faculty but instead uses faculty from Howard, George Washington, and Georgetown universities as well as teachers from the city's health department and the community. Students must take five core courses (such as biostatistics, epidemiology, and social and behavioral sciences) and two other required courses–global health, and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health. They also choose three electives from among 65 graduate classes that include three new courses introduced alongside the M.P.H. program–community nutrition, mental health, and public health policy.
Students also attend a biweekly seminar focused on solutions to current public health problems and complete a community practicum in which they use a team approach to solve a problem in the school system, the health department, or a cancer center.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funds a separate 2-year program–at six institutions–that accepts 18 scholars who have completed doctoral training. The program aims “to build the field of population health,” defined as taking a broad approach to understanding why some groups of people are healthy and others are not, but it does not focus specifically on racial and ethnic health disparities.