Personal Professional Development (Public Health and Primary Care) / Course details
Year of entry: 2025
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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.
Title | Code | Credit rating | Mandatory/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 |
Displaying 10 of 24 course units | |||
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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:
- monthly public health journal clubs;
- the annual Festival of Public Health ;
- Public Health International Summer School;
- Continuous Professional Development (CPD) events ;
- free open-access courses.