POPLHLTH111

PoplHlth111 was great, because it did not require nearly as much work as the science subjects to do well. Maybe that was because the concepts were logical and weren’t exactly mind-boggling in the slightest. Or maybe it’s because there wasn’t nearly as much content in one lecture, and more just examples of real world applications of concepts. Whatever it was, I am glad of it.

Some people complained about how boring this paper was, but then, I would much rather a boring paper with less work required than a hella interesting paper with a whole heap of work required. So, keep an open mind going into this paper, because you might come to love it for the break it gives your poor swamped brain.

PoplHlth111 doesn’t have a courseguide like all your other subjects, the only thing remotely close to a courseguide is a little booklet that has the learning objectives for each module and each lecture within the modules.

Structure

Lectures

PoplHlth111 is divided into 4 ‘Modules’. Each module is taught by a different lecturer and looks at a completely different aspect of Population Health. PoplHlth111 doesn’t have a courseguide like all your other subjects, the only thing remotely close to a courseguide is a little booklet that has the learning objectives for each module and each lecture within the modules.

1. Measuring the Frequency of Dis-ease in Different Countries
   Before you start wondering if you have spelled ‘disease’ wrong your entire life, you haven’t — spelling it ‘dis-ease’ is just a little quirk of this this paper (they’ll explain it, I won’t spoil it here). This module is taught by the legendary Rod Jackson, and butter will forever be ruined for you. This module introduces you to the principles of epidemiology and how epidemiologists measure and study the frequency and causes of dis-ease in populations. Rod Jackson provides you with this little 35-page booklet called the ‘The GATE Notes’. These are essentially your bible for his module. He even changes the colour of the stuff you aren’t expected to know at this stage. So just make sure you download your copy of these notes — they are great.
2. Understanding the Determinants of Health
   For pretty much everyone, this section is a real drag. Basically you go through all the key factors that impact health, from a social, demographic and environmental perspective. If you did NCEA Health, this won’t even be new to you. The lectures at this stage are what cause people to complain about PoplHlth. But just remember — at least it is easy and completely logical. Always look on the bright side. All this stuff is important to understand, but it probably could be condensed into fewer lectures. At some point during this unit, you will have Papaarangi Reid come and talk about the history of Maori health in New Zealand. A few people didn’t appreciate her lecturing style, but honestly, I really enjoyed her lecture.
3. Strategies for Improving Population Health
   This module builds on the last two, saying “now we have the evidence and understand why, now what can we do about it?”. It goes through the rationale behind deciding when to take action and planning the appropriate action, as well as some examples. This section wasn’t particularly thrilling either, but, hey, again, it’s not hard and we always have to be thankful when things are easy. Just stay on top of your note-taking, and it will be a piece of cake.
4. Global Health: Describing, Investigating and Addressing Inequitable Distributions in Health
   This module ties all the modules together, bringing the course to a well-rounded end. We had an amaaaazing lecturer in our year for this part of the course, but sadly she finished teaching the paper, so I cannot say if your lecturer will be as good as the one we had. This module looks at problems at a global scale such as the ‘Global Burden of Disease Project’; disability; mortality; non-communicable diseases; road crashes; HIV/AIDS; youth health and climate change. Ultimately this is a really tangible module that helps you see how everything you have learnt in the course relates to health on a big scale. This was my favourite module by far.

Tutorials/Workshops

Where your other subjects have labs, PoplHlth has 2-hour tutorial. There is one every two weeks. There are five tutorials. The first one is an introductory tutorial, and the last is a presentation (I will explain this more in the ‘Assessment’ section). The other three teach content that is best taught in a smaller setting than a lecture. It is really important to attend these tutorials as you cannot find this information anywhere else, and the content is tested in the final exam. There are usually pre-workshop readings, and a hand-out that you should print out and bring to the class.

1. Introductory Tutorial
   In this tutorial, you will be allocated to a group, and your group will be allocated a dis-ease to study and make a presentation on (I will detail this later). The format of future tutorials is explained.
2. Age Standardisation
   In this tutorial, you will have practice at hanging a study on the GATE frame, and calculating the occurrence of outcomes. After this, the process of age-standardisation will be explained and practiced.
3. Ethnicity Coding
   This workshop is all about understanding ethnicity and how it relates to population health. There are different ways of coding ethnicity and you will learn how to code ethnicity and to list the advantages and disadvantages of each output. You will also learn how to hang determinant of health onto the GATE frame and how to measure inequality and relative inequality and interpret their meanings.
4. Haddon Matrix
   They won’t let you forget it, but this tutorial teaches you something that is worth a huge chunk of the final exam. In my year, it was worth a massive 20% of the final exam. I thought it was crazy that one-fifth of our exam grade was determined by something we learnt in less than two hours. You have to do a rather long pre-reading for this workshop too — just a warning!
5. Presentation
   In this workshop, your group will do your final presentation that you have been working on outside of class time. You will also watch everyone else’s presentations. Everyone at least has a different dis-ease, so you don’t have to listen to the same thing over and over again. Time went pretty fast I think.

All in all, tutorials are pretty fun if you have a cool group of people, and they are only two hours (compared to three hour labs), so that is also much appreciated. It means you either get to go home an hour earlier (if you are morning stream) or sleep in an hour longer (if you are afternoon stream).

Assessment

Workshops (15%)

How workshops are assessed is honestly a little confusing. I am going to try my best to break it down for you. Scroll to the end of this Workshop section for the actual mark allocation, before that I am going to try waffle and explain what the heck you are marked on.

In your first tutorial, you are assigned a group and a dis-ease. From this tutorial until the presentation day (the last tutorial), you must work with your group outside of class hours to research and put together a presentation surrounding your disease.
They want you to: define the problem; identify risk and protective factors; describe public health interventions for this disease and relate them to population health approaches you have been taught; identify a study that supports your intervention and hang it on the GATE frame; and describe how you would assure widespread adoption of your intervention.
It sounds like a heck-of-a-lot of work. If you have a good group, you can split all these tasks fairly evenly. They basically want you to practice all the things you are learning in the lectures.

As part of this assessment, you must meet with your group fortnightly outside of class time. During these meetings you must take meeting minutes about everything discussed (they give you a template for this). At the next tutorial, you hand in your meeting minutes. Thus, there are three lots of meeting minutes you must hand in (Workshops 2, 3 & 4). The meeting minutes, combined with the tutor observing your active participation in each workshop, is worth 1% towards your final grade.

Presentation day is when the bulk of the marks are handed out. There are three parts to this grade. Two markers are present during your presentation, and the higher mark from the two of them from each sub-section is awarded — thus giving you the highest mark possible.

1. Group Mark — this is marked out of a total of 21. Your group all receives the same grade for this part. You are marked on the information you present and whether you cover all aspects they want you to cover. You also get 2 marks in total for: the quality of your slides; referencing; your responses to questions at the end; and whether everyone speaks for at least one minute.
2. Individual Mark — this is marked out of 4, with two marks going to your communication (if it is clear and audible); and one mark each going to keeping the audience’s attention and your professionalism.
3. Peer Evaluation — before your final workshop, you complete a form where you give each member of your team a ranking between 1–5 based on their contributions and attitude. You must also write 2–3 sentences explaining your reasons for giving your score to each team member. Completing and submitting the evaluation is worth 1 mark. The other 2 marks for this section come from your average score from other members of your team.
   2 marks = average 4 — 5
   1.5 marks = average 3 — less than 4
   1 mark = average 2.5 — less than 3
   0.5 mark = average 2 — less than 2.5
   0 marks = average of less than 2

Phew. I told you it’s complicated. Now that you have read (and maybe, hopefully, kinda understand) what you are graded on, here is what they are actually worth:

• Workshop 2 participation+ meeting minutes submission = 1%
• Workshop 3 participation + meeting minutes submission = 1%
• Workshop 4 participation + meeting minutes submission = 1%
• Group Mark for Presentation = 7%
• Individual Mark for Presentation = 2%
• Peer Evaluation = 3%

I don’t even know if I explained that well enough…if you need further clarification, feel free to email me!

Midterm Test (25%)

The midterm test is a MCQ test with 50 questions. In my year, we had 105 minutes (don’t ask me why 105, I have absolutely no idea). Be very careful when reading answer options, as they all sound very similar, with maybe only a word or two difference. What I would suggest, is as soon as you seen something wrong with an option, cross out the part of the option that you think is wrong, and then put a cross through the letter/number of that option. This means that you can start to eliminate options quicker and when you come back to check your answers, you can quickly see why you decided that option was wrong. I would always circle the letter/number of the option I thought was correct, which also meant checking was easier. If you put dots or question marks next to answers you are unsure of, you know exactly where to come back and check if you are pressed for time — rather than checking the ones you are definite on.

Final Exam (60%)

The final exam is entirely short answer and examines everything from the entire year, including content taught in workshops. What is frustrating is that there are endless practice exams, however, there are no answers. This forces you to go back and look through your notes to mark yourself. Know how to do a Haddon Matrix, and how to do one well. In my year it was worth 20% of the final exam, which means it was worth 12% of your grade for the entire paper. It still blows my mind how much it was worth to be honest.

How I Studied

For Module 1, it is probably easiest to take notes by hand, as Rod likes to make you do a lot of GATE frame drawing. But honestly, at the end of his unit, get his GATE Notes, and make your own condensed summary of them. It is all I used to study for the exam, and I think I did pretty alright on his section.

For the other Modules, I would take notes on my laptop as they were talking, and I would take screenshots of key images from their slides and paste it into my notes as they talked.

When I got home each day, I would make some flashcards about the key theory that we learnt in the day. This did not take long, as the lecturers spend most of their time going through case studies. This meant making flashcards was actually quite a time-effective way to study. It also did not take long each night to keep up to date on the flashcards that were due to be practiced.

I studied for the midterm by doing my flashcards and reading through my notes — a pretty lazy way to study, but, I felt like I knew the content pretty well thanks to the flashcards I had been doing throughout the test.

The exam was the next morning after an afternoon chemistry exam. My exam study for PoplHlth was literally in the time between my chemistry exam and the PoplHlth exam (yea I didn’t sleep much at all). But I knew I was going to need a lot more time to study chemistry than PoplHlth (just how my brain is wired), so I had prepared in advance. A few weeks before classes ended, I found all the learning objectives for each lecture, and then wrote them out into a Word document. I then found all the relevant notes for that learning objective and typed them out in nice, concise way underneath the learning objective. This was how I made sure I knew everything they were going to test on, and brought my lengthy lecture notes down to a more manageable size. I printed all these out and kept them in a folder, ready for the night of cramming (disclaimer: I think cramming is bad, but let’s be honest, desperate times call for desperate measures). When I studied that night, I did a lot of past exams and marked myself using my condensed, organised-by-learning-objective notes. PoplHlth is a subject you can cram — if you were wondering. I ended up doing pretty decent on the exam, getting an A (pretty stoked after one night of hard out prep). Luckily, my coursework meant I scored myself an A+.

The most stressful part of PoplHlth was the group presentation. Trusting other people to get work done, and done to a high enough standard is something I struggle with. But we allocated each person a section to research and make the relevant PowerPoint slides for. That person then wrote the script for that section and presented it in the presentation. We allocated people sections as fairly as possible, ensuring that no one had more marks than others as their responsibility and that everyone got approximately equal amounts of presentation time. Some groups knew their presentations off by heart and were absolutely flawless. This required a lot of time practicing together. We had a couple run-throughs to make sure we were within the time limit, but we didn’t go overboard. Each person brought cue cards up the front. We dressed smartly and acted confidently. Despite not knowing our words off by heart, we managed to get full marks overall. Do what needs to be done, don’t sweat it on the extra.

So there you have it! PoplHlth111 in all its glory. Hope this helped and didn’t actually confuse you more…