Contents : syllabus · memos · links
François BriatteThe course as I currently teach it is a variation of Florence Jusot's course, based on her initial set of lecture slides and material from 2009. The course syllabus includes all recommended readings, assignments and coursework instructions. Slides, presentations and other relevant material are regularly uploaded onto the ENTG, in order for the course to cover as much ground as possible on the topic.
I know only of two other courses available to French students focusing on health inequalities: Marc Fleurbaey's “Équité et inégalités en santé” course at the University Paris Descartes, and Signild Vallgårda's “Social inequalities in health” course within the European Public Health Master offered by a consortium of public health schools. Please email if you find any other one!
The course runs principally through presentations, both by myself and by students. Craig Allin, who runs several policy courses at Cornell College, has excellent advice on what presentations should achieve, and as an example of what kind of expectations I hold for the presentations, check these excellent slides by former student Sarah Cramer.
Instructions on policy memos appear in the course syllabus and will be extensively discussed in class. The assignment is a close analog to Angela Fertig's policy memo assignment for her health policy course at the University of Georgia. You might hence turn to her memo instructions and memo example for guidance and expectations.
For roughly similar guidelines, you can refer to Marja Soo's guidelines on writing policy memos for her course on public policy analysis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and to Arthur C. Brook's policy memo instructions for his course on the fundamentals of policy analysis at the University of Syracuse. For style and format, you might want to take a look at the policy memo example provided by Harvard University, as well as to the example featured in Susan Murcott's assignments for her course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Finally, Jessica Greene at the University of Oregon runs a comparable exercise among her undergraduate students. The following is taken from her 2009 syllabus on health policy:
Policy Memos. [S]tudents will be assigned a state health care reform initiative that has either been proposed or is in the process of implementation. Students will be responsible for finding the official health policy documentation, as well as related newspaper and academic articles. For each topic area (access, cost, quality, disparities) students will write a succinct policy memo describing the approach the reform effort is using to address the topic that highlights promising elements and issues of concern.
The memos should be written for the Director of Health and Human Services. She is very busy, though wants to be apprised of relevant reform efforts around the country. She is a notorious stickler about writing. She expects the memo to be well organized, clearly written, and polished. She will read no more than two double spaced pages. It is advisable that students do two or more of the following prior to submitting a memo: read it aloud, have a colleague review it, and/or visit the Writing Center for feedback. Make sure that all quotes, paraphrases, and borrowed ideas are cited. Graduate students are required to have at least three references in each memo.
Revision of Policy Memos. Undergraduate students are required to revise two of their policy memos. After receiving a memo back with written feedback, students have one week’s time to revise it addressing the issues raised in the comments. The original memo should be submitted with the revised memo.
Reading good memos is a good source of inspiration. Craig Allin from Cornell College has made A-graded papers available on environmental policy and on American politics, as well as a sound argument on hierarchies of contention.
(I will eventually write up my own instructions when I get a chance to. In the meantime, you should take the exercise quite seriously. Memos guide the work of decision-makers on a daily basis: they are not a minor aspect of policy and politics, and some of them, like the Downing Street memo, even achieve some form of fame through time. To take an even more recent example, advice memos from bank analysts have played a crucial role in informing governments about the state of the ongoing financial crisis.)
Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about global health inequalities is to watch a few of Hans Rosling's videos, which bring the power of animated statistics to a whole new level. His videos on global public health data and HIV/AIDS are among the most stunning. His nonprofit organization Gapminder also has useful data on display, on topics such as health and wealth, child mortality or several types of cancer. If you have a specific interest in HIV/AIDS, I also recommend Elizabeth Pisani's talk, author of a book and blog on sex, drug use and the international AIDS control regime (see Steven Epstein's outline of the argument). Still within the journalist/blog range, I finally recommend Sarah Boseley's global health blog over at the Guardian.
With regards to epidemiology and health economics, several research units are regularly producing first-tier academic studies that can be accessed online; in Paris, IRDES is a one-stop-shop for both French and English publications in that strand of research, with a focus on health insurance inequalities; in London, the Global Health Equity Group and International Institute for Society and Health at UCL (headed by Michael Marmot, from the Marmot Review) are the first units to browse on global and European health inequalities, along with LSE Health and its excellent policy-oriented publication Eurohealth (disclaimer: I was a visitor at LSE Health during summer 2009).
The following list points to some leading academics in the vast strand of research formed around health inequalities, and is by no means exhaustive. (On methodological grounds, I did not calculate any centrality measure to tag the following names as “leading” – my assessment is based on my selective reading of the literature since 2006.)
The politics of health inequalities do not currently form a coherent, developed research agenda, but interesting research is gradually feeding that perspective, such as the work of Julia Lynch, Carles Muntaner, Vicente Navarro and of some of the aforementioned authors. On the ethical side of the issue, here are a few people to follow on health inequalities and the principles of social justice that we might apply to them:
(On Sen's capability approach, one of the most challenging but most interesting background readings is Adam Przeworski's argument on freedom to choose and democracy. Much of Ingrid Robeyns' work is also very helpful in understanding the reach and limits of capabilities. For a short but immensely useful text by Amartya Sen himself, you should first turn to his keynote address on health equity.)
Last, some journals publish extensively on the topic of health inequalities. Depending on your research and academic interests, you might want to flick through the Lancet, the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, Health Economics or through Social Science & Medicine, to give only a few examples. Any literature review on the issue should naturally start with an extensive search on PubMed and on policy-related portals, such as the European Portal for Action on Health Equity or the UK Department of Health health inequalities resources.
Internet links are fairly sensitive to page removal or modification, so please report any broken link by email. You are also welcome to submit your own links and suggestions of additional information that should be featured on the present page.