Course Descriptions

HEG 215 - Global Health and Culture

3 Credits

Global Health is emerging as a critical driver of world change and global sustainable development. This course explores the biosocial theoretical concepts and the historical contexts that are contributors to this shift and are influencing the establishment of global health as a stand alone discipline of study. This course encourages cultural sensitivity and global citizenship. It focuses on challenging embedded assumptions about what actually supports good health and humane healthcare and what actually causes poor health and disease in various cultures around the world. Topics include: history of 19th and 20th century medicine, population health, racism, WHO global regions, UN Sustainable Goals, Global Burden of Disease, health disparities, mental health, indigenous cultures, cultural healing practices and beliefs, contagious diseases, obesity, human rights, natural and complex human disasters

New SUNY General Education: SUNY - World History and Global Awareness

Retiring SUNY General Education: SUNY-OWC - Other World Civilizations (SOW2)

MCC General Education: MCC-GLO - Global Understanding (MGLO), MCC-SSD - Social Science and Diversity (MSSD), MCC-HW - Health and Wellness (MHW)

Course Learning Outcomes
1. Recognize the essential knowledge needed to accept Global Health as a specialized broader arena of public health and medicine
2. Explain the historical turning points leading to the development of Global Health and the World Health Organization (WHO)
3. Discuss how history underlies the Determinants of Health in one WHO region of the world
4. Describe health as a driver of sustainability and as critical to the achievement of particular UN Sustainable Development Goals
5. Analyze how a culture's vulnerability to disease and its cultural resilience to disease can be working simultaneously with the same culture
6. Illustrate how a global health system or how the human existence can be affected by cultural influences

Course Offered Fall; Spring

Use links below to see if this course is offered:
Intersession 2025
Spring Semester 2025