Health policy provides an insight into how health psychologists can best work within the health service. This module first explores the role of health psychologists in planning, developing and evaluating interventions in health promotion, public health. The skills include assessing need, targeting a campaign, strategies for changing behaviour, the multidisciplinary group, communication strategies and evaluation. Settings include the work place, schools and the community. Sessions provide opportunities to develop problem solving, team-work and communication skills.
Student groups design a health promotion campaign.
In the second half, we examine a range of psychological interventions that have been successfully applied in assisting those with chronic diseases and problems. Practising health psychologist's present the different ways they provide health care in their specialist areas of, for example, heart disease and stroke, cancer, HIV and disfigurement. These two half modules are designed to equip students with the skills to use and interpret multivariate statistics, using SPSS, and to provide an appreciation of the applications of multivariate analysis in health. An aim is to help students better understand and interpret results from research papers. Topics include multidimensional scaling, logistic regression, meta-analysis and structural equation modelling.