You can choose from the following courses:
The course consists of two parts. In the first three weeks, quantitative and epidemiological topics will be the focus. They include causal inference, using causal graphs as a tool for designing quantitative analyses, and advanced interpretation of logistic and ordinary least squared regression results. The next two weeks will be devoted to understanding qualitative research methods, with a specific focus on researching language (discourse analysis) and practices (ethnography), and on formulating theoretically informed research questions. In the final week, quantitative and qualitative methods will be combined and students will present their assessments of several published studies.
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Healthcare managers increasingly are confronted with changes in the policy environment affecting the ways they organize and manage daily care processes. For example, legal requirements for patient participation force healthcare managers to install patient representatives in their advisory boards, and safety regulations ask for structured ways of organizing and accounting for the quality of care within healthcare organizations. Policy measures also influence the strategic choices of managers; if patient safety is displayed as an important problem in healthcare, rendering patient safety a top priority of the healthcare institution can be a valuable way of presenting the institution to third-party payers and patients.
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Employees are of crucial importance for the delivery of health care and the performance of health care organisations. Therefore, the management of health care organisations involves managing people. This course aims to provide insights in the behaviour of individuals and groups in organisations and the effects on performance and health care delivery. The first part of the course focusses on the management of employees using insights from Human Resource Management and leadership theories. Further, dilemmas and tensions related to leadership, performance management, teamwork, patient-centeredness, professionals, and well-being within healthcare organizations will be discussed.
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Quality and safety are very much on the agenda of health care governance throughout the world. In this course we actively engage students to explore the theoretical backgrounds to, as well as the major themes of, quality and safety governance. In general, the course takes the position that quality and safety in health care needs continuous work. We emphasize the need for both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to quality and safety, and place particular stress on theories of the 'middle' - the level where the work of management and leadership usually resides. The course explores six challenges that come from this 'mangle of the middle'. These challenges are said to face each quality and safety improvement effort, and can be structural, political, cultural, technological, emotional and educational.
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You can choose from the following courses:
The course consists of two parts. In the first three weeks, quantitative and epidemiological topics will be the focus. They include causal inference, using causal graphs as a tool for designing quantitative analyses, and advanced interpretation of logistic and ordinary least squared regression results. The next two weeks will be devoted to understanding qualitative research methods, with a specific focus on researching language (discourse analysis) and practices (ethnography), and on formulating theoretically informed research questions. In the final week, quantitative and qualitative methods will be combined and students will present their assessments of several published studies.
Read more in the course catalogue
This course builds on the knowledge acquired during Health Technology Assessment. The focus of the course is more economical than HTA. Several methodological problems in economic evaluation will be treated. The problems treated are typically issues that are at the center of the scientific debate. Students will be encouraged to think actively about these issues and formulate their own opinions in a balanced way.
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Why do countries which share many similarities, such as the USA and Canada, have such different healthcare systems? Why do healthcare policies often change incrementally, even when stakeholders in the governance of health care argue for immediate change? And why may healthcare policies that are successful in one country fail in another?
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Following years of controls, rationing and expenditure caps, many countries introduce market-based health care reforms. Competitive interactions between health care providers and payers create incentives that affect market players’ behavior and the price, quality and quality of health care services. This is especially true in the United States, where the majority of total health expenditures are privately financed and prices, quantities and qualities for health care services are determined by market interactions. But competitive forces also shape strategic interactions in health care systems which are mostly publically financed and where prices are regulated (for example, the British NHS).
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This course builds on Economics and Financing of Health Care, in which the principles of health economics and health care financing are explained. This course uses the tools and concepts discussed in that course to analyse and compare health and health care at the macro or system level. The performance of health care systems may be evaluated by analysing whether the outcomes are efficient and equitable. Therefore, this course consists of three parts.
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In the HEPL elective Politics, Policy and Law, students focus on understanding the political nature of healthcare decision-making and with this in mind making recommendations for appropriate policies, for "tough" health and welfare issues. The policy recommendations are produced on a project basis in small collaborative groups of students under the expert guidance of a lecturer. The various projects are supported by substantive lectures. Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: 1) Identify the politics in health care decision-making. 2) Analyze political health and welfare issues from a political and legal perspective and their underlying values. 3) Formulate recommendations for appropriate policies for “though” health and welfare issues.
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In the developing world, millions of people have no, or limited access to urgently needed health care. Universal access to essential health care is an important but elusive goal. Many poor households are exposed to great financial risks related to ill health, or are forced to forego essential treatments altogether. The World Health Organization has once again put universal health coverage (UHC) high on the policy agenda and the United Nations have embraced the UHC as one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals.
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This course focuses on the impact of international treaty law on regulating health care systems. Therefore, this course starts with identifying the underlying principles of health law. These principles explain the ratio of regulatory intervention in health care, i.e. good health. Good health raises questions about access to medical care, human rights and health care, scarcity of resources, mobility of patients, health professionals and medical products, and market competition in health care. For instance, who has access to health care services, what is the meaning of informed consent, and what services should be included/excluded from the basic benefit package. To a large extent these questions are influenced by legal standards as defined by international treaty law.
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A pharmaceutical pricing strategy is more than simply setting a price to recover R&D investments and adding a mark-up to guarantee a desired profit level. Indeed, a price has often little to no relationship to manufacturing costs in this market. It is the perceived value of a new drug in a broad sense, and how a drug is positioned in the market, that is critical to its success. Especially now that development costs are growing, blockbusters are being displaced by niche drugs, treatment is increasingly personalized, and governments are limiting expenditure on healthcare. For a pharmaceutical company, getting sufficient returns on investments and keeping the pipeline filled becomes increasingly challenging.
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