Postgraduate - UnitEPM5001 - Health indicators and health surveys

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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6 points, SCA Band 2, 0.125 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Postgraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
Organisational Unit	Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine
Offered	Alfred Hospital First semester 2015 (Off-campus)
Coordinator(s)	Professor Julie Simpson

Synopsis

Introduction to a variety of health-related data collection sources, calculation of population fertility, mortality & morbidity rates, health service utilisation measures, disease registration & reporting. Use of direct & indirect age standardisation, life expectancy calculations, valid comparisons & health differentials. Development, design & delivery of health questionnaires. Use of focus groups, standard instruments for health surveys, coding, validity, reliability of measures & models of data collection. Efficient sampling strategies, data interpretation & analysis including stratification, clustering & weighting.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

derive and compare population measures of mortality, illness, fertility and survival, using basic demographic tools such as life tables and age standardisation;
access the main sources of routinely collected health data and choose the appropriate one, taking into account their advantages and disadvantages;
design a valid and reliable health survey to collect primary data, design an efficient sampling strategy to obtain random sample of the target population, and choose the most appropriate mode of delivery;
analyse, interpret and present the results of survey data, taking the sampling strategy into account.