Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) / Course details

Year of entry: 2025

Course description

Our Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) courses meet the training needs of health professionals who are either interested in a career in public health or want to develop new skills in a specific area of public health, primary care or research methods.

Contemporary public health practice requires practitioners to be adaptable and flexible, with broad experience of a range of subject areas.

Our Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) courses will equip you with:

  • the skills and knowledge to apply to public health concerns at local, national and international level;
  • the ability to apply relevant theory and scientific principles to practical situations;
  • the capability of meeting core-competencies in public health;
  • research skills such as epidemiology, statistics and qualitative research methods.

You can take our Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) courses as part of a personal career development programme, or if you are considering a substantive degree in public health and have been out of education for some time.

Both distance and blended learning options are available to help you fit study around your other commitments.

See the course unit list for more information about each unit, or contact mph.admin@manchester.ac.uk .

PhD with integrated master's

If you're planning to undertake a PhD after your master's, our Integrated PhD programme will enable you to combine your postgraduate taught course with a related PhD project in biology, medicine or health.

You can also visit this page for examples of projects related to integrated master's courses.

Special features

Expert teaching

You will be taught by professionals working in the field of local, national and international public health. There is an emphasis on applying your learning to real life public health issues.

Flexible learning

All of the course content is delivered online, enabling you to fit study around other commitments. There are both fully online and blended options where face-to-face sessions are planned.

Learn with students from around the world

You will be able to mix with students from a range of disciplines from all over the world. We have over 1,500 alumni from more than 80 countries.

Distance learning support

We have a dedicated team of e-learning technologists to help support you throughout your studies and resolve any issues you might have on a one-to-one basis.

Teaching and learning

Most of our courses are delivered completely online. A learning structure with a recommended pace is in place throughout the unit, with specific deadlines for all summative assessments.

Some course units require your participation throughout and some of the optional units are blended, which require a mandatory face-to-face element. Please check whether your chosen course unit includes any face-to-face teaching days, as this is clearly stated in the Course Unit Overview. If you are unable to attend a face-to-face component due to mitigating circumstances, you may be permitted to repeat this unit in a subsequent year. However, if you are unable to attend the face-to-face sessions, please do not choose one of the blended units. Please contact mph.admin@manchester.ac.uk if this is likely to be a problem.

Coursework and assessment

You will use a number of assessed and non-assessed activities to develop key skills and expand your knowledge base. The assessment is based on assignments and other activities such as moderated discussion boards and group work.

This Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) programme is not award-bearing and allows you to complete up to three units from the MPH syllabus.

After successfully completing this level of the course, you could then be considered for progression to the award-bearing levels of our course (PGCert, PGDip, MPH), through re-application.

Course unit details

You are able to select the units you would like to take as part of this course from the pool of units available on our Master of Public Health programme. There are no core units and restrictions apply only to those units with pre-requisites.

You can choose up to a maximum of three taught units over two years, with a maximum of two units per semester.

Course unit list

The course unit details given below are subject to change, and are the latest example of the curriculum available on this course of study.

TitleCodeCredit ratingMandatory/optional
Health Promotion Theory & Methods POPH60021 15 Optional
Evidence Based Practice POPH60041 15 Optional
Working with Communities POPH60072 15 Optional
Economic Evaluation in Healthcare POPH60092 15 Optional
Practical Statistics for Population Health POPH60982 15 Optional
Fundamentals of Epidemiology POPH60991 15 Optional
Communicable Disease Control POPH62051 15 Optional
Health Systems Challenges in Low and Middle Income Countries POPH62212 15 Optional
Global Health into the 21st Century POPH62311 15 Optional
Global Women's Public Health POPH62411 15 Optional
Qualitative Research Methods POPH63121 15 Optional
Emergency Planning, Response & Resilience POPH64132 15 Optional
Implementation Sciences POPH64552 15 Optional
Health Services Management POPH64662 15 Optional
Intercultural Public Health POPH64771 15 Optional
Health Improvement POPH65012 15 Optional
Digital Public Health POPH65022 15 Optional
Climate Change and Health POPH65042 15 Optional
Introduction to Health Policy POPH65052 15 Optional
Behaviour Change and Public Health POPH65062 15 Optional
Public Health and the Antibiotic Crisis POPH65072 15 Optional
Business, Media & Health POPH65092 15 Optional
Infection Prevention & Control POPH65552 15 Optional
Nutrition and Public Health POPH66662 15 Optional
Displaying 10 of 24 course units

Scholarships and bursaries

For the latest scholarship and bursary information please visit the fees and funding page.

What our students say

This course shares some units with our Master of Public Health (MPH) course. Read about Ogochukwu Okoye's experience of the MPH and see what our Student Ambassadors have to say in our blog .

Disability support

Online learning resources are designed with accessibility as a priority, using the latest web accessibility technologies.

Further practical support and advice for current students and applicants is available from the Disability Advisory and Support Service .

CPD opportunities

In addition to our Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) units, we also run: