Hello, everyone! This is Henry Perry again, and I want to welcome you to this audio portion of our talk, now.
We just had a brief video, and now, we're going to have a brief introduction to the course itself, and talk about some of the nuts and bolts of how the course will operate. And then following this, we'll move ahead with our first, substantial lecture on the, history of primary health care.
The learning goals for this course are to discuss the principles of primary health care established at the 1978
International Conference on Primary
Health Care as described in the
Declaration of Alma-Ata, and then to recognize the potential of primary health care to help achieve Health for All.
These are the overall aims for our course, and it's more specific learning objectives. I'd like to for you to try to be able to critically assess how to contribute to strengthening priority health care and achieving Health for All and I'd like for you to Keep this on a personal level.
How can you as an individual contribute to this, and of course, many of you will be working organizations, and you can be thinking at the same time, how your organization, or how you and your role within that organization you can make a contribution in ways that you aren't already. And one of the other fundamental parts of the learning objective for this course will be to help you think a little bit more deeply about participatory methods in building community capacity to solve priority problems in varied healthcare settings. So this whole notion of community participation, community partnership, community empowerment, is a fundamental idea in primary health care, as expressed in Alma-Ata that's frequently missing from other versions of primary health care. And in particular the more medicalized notion of primary medical care to make participation in the role of communities as partners, is not frequently well developed. But for our purposes in thinking about improving the health and severely impoverished settings where resources are so limited.
Working with communities as partners and as valued resources is a fundamental part of this and so I hope this will be a part of what you get out of this course that may be new to you.
Our course is a 5-week course, and so we'll run on a weekly basis, with a different set of activities each week.
The first four weeks will consist of lectures and readings, or materials to view on the internet, and some other activities related to participation in the bulletin board, or, preparing for an exam, or writing your paper, or grading someone else's paper.
The final week of the course will be devoted exclusively to the peer grading of your student-colleague's paper.
So, each week, we will have a five minute or so video outlining the work for that week. And then there will be approximately one hour of lecture each week, and then approximately one hour of additional materials, some of these are readings that I'll be asking you to review and others will be videos that I've picked up that are very inspiring to me and I hope will be of great interest to you.
So, those two things, the lecture and the readings, or the viewings of, special clips on the Internet, will take together about 2 hours a week, and then it's my intent that you will have approximately two hours each week for additional activities, making your total commitment to complete this course on the order of 4 hours a week.
So in those additional 2 hours, you'll need some time to be reflecting on what you've read and what you've heard, some time to review the written materials, prepare for your weekly quiz, which I'll tell you about in just a minute.
And we hope you'll participate on the course bulletin board, and also participate as a peer reviewer in the grading papers of your colleagues.
But all of that should be readily accomplished in about two hours a week.
So, the theme for this week is introduction to primary healthcare and
Health for All, and reflection on the historical roots of this whole concept of primary healthcare.
And next week, in week 2, we'll be exploring in some detail various elements of primary healthcare and its more complicated manifestations.
And then the third week we'll be, discussing some examples, some approaches in which primary health care has been applied in resource constraint settings and these are approaches that have been exciting for me and i think have a lot of relevance for the future.
And then in the fourth week we'll be talking specifically about community health workers and their contribution to community based primary health care, as well as some of the current exciting approaches to programming activities in the community, not only with community health workers but in other ways as well.
And so then, as I mentioned before, the fifth week will be solely on grading the papers of some of your colleagues.
So each week you'll have a short multiple-choice quiz.
It'll be available at the end of the week. We'll have all the details on the course website for you.
This will be a quiz that will be graded automatically. And you'll see the results, and you can take this quiz up to four times.
And when you take it and see the results, if you have answered wrongly on a specific question, we will provide you with some information about why that was an incorrect answer.
The answer and then at the end of the second and the fourth weeks, you'll be submitting a brief paper in response to a question that we'll be posing to you.
And the first paper will be only 2 pages long and the second paper will be 4 pages long. So it's not a major effort, but it'll help you to focus your thinking on some of the issues that we think are important. And these two papers will be graded by your peers, and this will be probably a new experience, probably a new experience for many of you, and this is one of the innovative aspects about the course here.
And so, we're learning as we go along in this too so we look forward to participating in this with you.
All of the materials that you will be asked to either read or review will be documents or videos that can be downloaded off the internet, and then we'll also be providing for you some supplementary readings or Internet based videos for those of you who want to pursue this topic in more detail.
And then finally, I'll be spending several hours each week reviewing the postings on the bulletin board.
I'll have a teaching assistant working with me on this.
And we'll do our best to respond to queries, and participate in discussions, and we look forward to seeing your comments and, and questions as you go through this course.
In order to pass the course you'll need to complete the assignments on time.
And you'll need to have a score of 70 or higher, and if you do, you'll get a certificate of completion.
Each quiz will be worth ten points, so there're four quizzes, so that's 40 points. The first paper will be worth 20 points and the second paper will be worth 40 points. And unfortunately, the logistics of running one of these courses make it necessary for us to not allow submissions following the deadline, and I Think you'll understand the need for that, but we won't be able to deal with exceptional circumstances, which professors are always dealing with in the live classroom with real live problems that students always have.
So we beg for your tolerance on this particular issue.
But I hope this gives you a sense of the course, and how we'll operate on a practical basis, and we look forward to moving ahead, and we'll move right into the, first lecture now.
Thank you very much.