Epidemiology and statistics at the Nordic School of Public Health: Teaching and research 1979

Abstract

The Nordic School of Public Health (NHV) was jointly founded in 1953 by the Nordic countries. Until 1979, the school provided ad hoc courses on public health topics, using external teachers drawn mainly from the Nordic countries. At the time, the permanent staff of the school was small. In 1979, it began a Master’s degree programme and a few academic positions were established and filled, to support these courses. The programme included four main areas: Epidemiology, Social Medicine, Environmental Health and Health Services Administration. Epidemiology was compulsory in all Master of Public Health (MPH) exams, but there were a handful of optional courses that could be substituted for the other subjects.

This paper tells the story of Epidemiology at NHV from about 1980, up until closure of the school in 2014. The original MPH model ran until 1995. Nursing Science entered NHV from about 1985 and worked mainly with qualitative research that often focused on individual patients. The new methods attracted nurses, midwives, psychologists and other groups that previously had been less represented in NHV. Being quantitative and population oriented, Epidemiology lost its unique position as a mandatory subject for the MPH examination. In addition the ‘New Public Health’ proposed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that advocated health promotion and the philosophy of salutogenesis became a challenge for the programme in epidemiology: pathogenesis no longer was of primary interest. From 1995, the MPH format changed repeatedly and a DrPH programme was begun. For the last 8 years of its existence, NHV offered a reasonably comprehensive, basic course in Epidemiology.

Throughout the years, epidemiology training and research at NHV were very traditional. In being a relatively free institution in terms of academic choices, NHV should have contributed to the development and innovation of epidemiology in public health. For several reasons, this did not happen.

Keywords

Epidemiology teaching research public health Nordic countries history

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Epidemiology and statistics at the Nordic School of Public Health: Teaching and research 1979–2014

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