Public Health - Where can the degree take me?

My name is Dragan Illich. I'm a professor at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine and also Director of Teaching and Learning. I'm going to answer some of the most common questions that we get asked about our Master of Public Health. What is public health? So, public health is all about preventing illness and promoting well-being at a population level. You can think of working in public health as almost being like a health detective. That is, you're faced with a health issue and you have to ask questions, investigate that and quite often that'll lead to more questions before you get to the answer that you're actually looking for. What kind of career can I pursue with a Master of Public Health? One of the great advantages of our MPH is you can either take a generalist approach or specialise in one of the following areas, including epidemiology, global and planetary health, health economics, health policy, health promotion or a general public health specialisation. What organisations can I work for? There are a number of organisations that you can work for, starting off internationally such as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and other humanitarian and health organisations similar to those. You can work in government organisations such as the Department of Health, the Cancer Council of Australia and then there's industry as well, whether it be pharmaceutical companies or other private companies that work in healthcare. Can you give an example of a project that a public health professional may work on? So if we look at projects from a health data analytics perspective, the recent pandemic is a great example. A lot of our students ended up working at the Department of Health and working on projects in which they modelled the pandemic, modelled the virus in terms of its progression, but also then used that data to identify interventions in terms of being able to put together and implement prevention strategies. Don't take it just from me, let's now hear from someone who's actually studied a Master of Public Health. My name is Hilaire Armstrong. Is that all you need? The question is what is your job? So my job, I'm a technical officer working in the Partnerships and Collaboration Team at the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe. What does your day look like in that job? So when I'm working from the Copenhagen office, my day starts with a bike ride. I bike into UN city and then it's very dynamic at the regional office. So I could be facilitating the youth engagement session with youth organisations and individuals on a range of health and wellbeing topics. I could be conducting a health situation analysis of a country. The WHO Regional Office for Europe obviously has country offices and we have 53 member states in the region. So I've had the opportunity to travel to many countries, so Kazakhstan, Albania, the Netherlands in the last few years. Why did you choose to study public health? Okay, good question. Initially, I was working as a speech pathologist, which was working one-on-one with clients, but I really was interested in working on projects which had system level impacts that affected a whole population's health and wellbeing outcomes. I think I like to solve complex problems because it's very rewarding at the end. There's one solution here, but then you have another issue here. So it's always trying to like complete the puzzle. It's not easy, it's challenging and it's solving those problems. That's why I like public health. So one of the great advantages of public health is that we're able to make an impact and make a change at a population or a public level. With traditional medicine, traditional healthcare, we're often treating the patient and we're often treating them at that end of the spectrum. Public health is really at the front end of that spectrum where we can prevent disease and promote wellbeing.