[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS THROUGHOUT]

Dr. Andrew Harmer: There's lots of things that make this programme stand out, but there are two which I think really deserve emphasizing. One is the students, and the other is the staff that work on it.

The students I think are the heart and soul of our programme, and they come from very diverse backgrounds, lots of different countries. And that means that the webinars and the forums can benefit from all of the experience that these students bring to the programme.

Our staff are amazing. They're also from various different countries around the world, and they can bring their experiences to the classroom.

And finally, we have an amazing student experience team. We have dedicated student experience support and they provide, a wide range of pastoral services.

In addition to critical and analytical thinking, which is really important, they will also gain, skills in individual and group work, group presentations, and in individual oral presentations. They'll also develop reflective skills. So you'll get to know yourself very well on the programme, and you'll begin to understand yourself a bit better, what you can do, the challenges that you're able to meet and overcome. And I think that's an important skill.

The advantages of studying online can be summarised as flexibility, accessibility, and community. What I mean by flexibility is that when you study online, you really can, build the degree around your life. You can watch webinars, they're all recorded so you can watch them in your own time. When you can follow the programme at your own pace.

Our content is really accessible. Our virtual learning platform is really good and easy to download the documents, read online. You can really build a great community. A lot of our students, they meet up virtually, they create their own WhatsApp groups, and they really get to know each other. And we find that our students develop peer to peer support groups. I think this is really great. It's a really good opportunity to meet other students online.

I tend to see global health as a prism through which students can shine light on, a range of different disciplines, health inequalities, epidemiology and statistics, health systems, health economics, global health policy, disease management, planetary health, and research methods.

And the benefit of having this multidisciplinary perspective is that employers, they'd like to see and employ somebody who can join the dots you know, between different disciplines. They can break out of the siloed way of thinking, and be able to make connections between different topics.

So our programme has a global reach and we have almost thirty countries represented. Our students typically they're working professionals often they come from a health background. So we have nurses, midwives, people who work in the public health profession. And we have non-health students who might be working in the civil service, the charity sector, pharmacy. So it's quite a wide representation.

You will have to study around 25 hours per week. You are embarking on a serious and rigorous academic challenge, especially if you have to combine the study with a full-time job, family, and social life.

With other distance learning courses, you're provided all the learning materials at the start of the year and study at your own pace. However, this approach to learning means it can take up to 5 years to complete your degree.

While this course demands around 25 hours of study per week, with the right time management skills, motivation, and discipline you will be able to complete your masters in 2 years. Our online course offers a time-bound structure, enabling you to engage and focus on a weekly basis.

The course content is also available via our learning platform’s mobile app, so you can study, read and post on forums on a phone or tablet while commuting. You're not limited to using a computer at home. 

The MSc in Global Public Health (Online) is part of a wider programme of study within the Barts and London School of Medicine and Dentistry, directed by a multidisciplinary team of academics from the Wolfson Institute of Population Health (WIPH). 

The goal of the WIPH is to improve the health of local, national and global populations by undertaking world-class research and training. 

The work of WIPH is focused around four areas of expertise:

• Primary Care and Mental Health
• Global Public Health
• Women's Health
• Clinical Trials and Methodology

MSc Global Public Health - Meet the Programme Director

Register to watch the full recording

MSc student Dana, who works as a Relief and Recovery Officer in emergency management, discusses what motivated her to study online:

 

Taking your IELTS English Language test?

Here are top tips from an IELTS examiner on how to prepare for each section and perform at your best on exam day.

4 skills are tested in the IELTS exam:

1. Reading
2. Listening
3. Speaking
4. Writing

Advice for reading

• Read newspapers and academic journals regularly to help improve your vocabulary and reading speed
• Download IELTS practice tests from the ielts.org website to learn how to identify the easiest questions
• During your exam, read through the paper in full initially and identify which questions are easier for you
• Start with the easier questions to guarantee yourself some marks and help you feel confident

Advice for listening

• Listen to the radio, TV and YouTube videos to help you understand various accents
• Practice your spelling of names, numbers and addresses

Advice for speaking

• Speak in English as much as possible in your day-to-day life
• On the day of the exam, see if you can speak in English to another candidate outside the exam hall, to put yourself at ease

Advice for writing

• Practice writing academic papers and get feedback from a teacher or professor if you can
• Get to know the band descriptors IELTS examiners use to mark your writing – you can find these on the ielts.org website
• Identify the areas you need to improve on and practice these before your exam
• During your exam, make sure you answer the question that’s being asked and complete all parts of the task

And finally...

Leave yourself plenty of time to prepare! If you can, try to book your exam at least six weeks in advance to give yourself enough time to practice the different skills. Practice makes perfect with the IELTS exam.

Have questions?

If you're unsure about any areas of the IELTS process and would like further advice, please reach out to our course adviser team.

• Tel: +44(0)20 3859 7192
• WhatsApp: +44 (0)7360 818402

Andrew is the Programme Director for the online MSc in Global Public Health and a Senior lecturer in Global Health Policy in the Centre for Global Public Health, Institute of Population Health Sciences.

He has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southampton. He has taught at the University of Edinburgh, Bocconi University (Milan), and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Andrew has led and coordinated a number of consultancy projects for leading development organisations on subjects including maternal and child health, health systems strengthening, and global health partnerships.

He has published in leading global health journals, most recently in the BMJ and the Lancet where he has written about climate change and the World Health Organisation.

Jennifer Randall is a medical anthropologist and a passionate, award-winning educator with teaching experience in the USA, UK and China.

Her teaching practice is informed by critical pedagogy (e.g. Freire and hooks) and she has guided hundreds of students on a journey of holistic critique that led to powerful transformations in people’s perspectives on global health and their individual power to engage in social change.

Her teaching expertise includes drug policy reform; participatory action research; mental disability and human rights; childbirth, infant feeding and parenting; and neglected tropical diseases.

What I enjoy most about Dr. Randall's teaching style is her ability to meet students at all levels - her intent listening, composure, honesty, and commitment to 'all' students being engaged, authentically heard, and understood. These facets of an educator are rare. Teaching to nurture student growth and change; teaching that goes straight into the heart.
Elise Pohl, Global Public Health MSc

Julia is a lecturer in Global Public Health. She has a Masters in Public Health (Global Health) from Manchester University, an MA in International Development Management from the Open University, an MSc in Social Research Methods from London School of Economics and a PhD in child development and wellbeing from the London School of Economics.  Her first degree was in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics.

Julia originally trained as a health professional and worked for ten years in various NHS hospitals around the country. She's taught on a Masters in Public Health (MPH) for the past 10 years and has worked as a researcher on a child development study, worked for The Children's Society, for Sure Start and for the family support charity Home-Start.  She's designed a number of epidemiology Masters level modules.  

More recently, Julia has worked with children who live or work on the street  in  Mongolia, Southern Africa and in Romania. Her area of expertise is global childhoods, children and families, global health, inequalities, gender, humanitarianism and international development.

Sian completed her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at UCL and went on to complete an MA in Education, Health Promotion, and International Development at UCL IOE. She most recently left the University of East London where she worked as a senior lecturer in Public Health and Health promotion, leading modules and projects on community engagement, structural violence, and the politics and practice of empowerment.

Her research interests focus on critical pedagogies, children and youth as active contributors of the social, and domains of wellbeing particularly a person’s sense of efficacy and agency; She uses anthropological and participatory methodologies to explore questions of power, powerlessness, and empowerment. Her most recent work explored the value of education for well-becoming, from the perspectives of young people themselves, within an emerging Public Private Partnership filling the much needed gap of secondary education in Pune, India.

An anthropologist with a deep interest in education and social justice and in preserving the natural world, Sonali's scholarly work is at the intersection of medical, cultural and linguistic anthropology.

She has several years experience teaching students in schools and colleges in India and abroad, conducting workshops in ethnography, drama and writing. Currently,  she is the educator and primary resource person on a project which interrogates ideas of identity and belonging in classrooms across three countries (India, Pakistan and the UK) by focussing on the Partition of Pakistan-India of 1947.

Sonali also teaches A-level Sociology at an alternative school in Bangalore where she foregrounds issues of sustainability and social justice. She's also part of a collaborative ten-month module-based course with ecologists, environmentalists and biologists (“An Apprenticeship in Ecological Nurturance) which works on issues of climate change and land care. She's extremely pleased to be part of Queen Mary Online’s Planetary Health module which offers an unusual combination of rigorous analytic, academic research and direct action. 

Sobia is a Physician with a Master’s in Public Health (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK) and a post-graduate degree in Public Policy and Program Evaluation (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada) with over a decade of work and teaching experience in the developing world (LIC). As a public servant, she serves under the Canadian federal government’s health portfolio in Ottawa, Canada. She manages eight complex, high materiality programs with a focus on capacity development and pan-Canadian stakeholder engagement, including Provinces and Territories, funding organizations, researchers, and patients.

She is passionate about emergency preparedness and disaster management. As a volunteer, after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, she coordinated several post-disaster reconstruction and rehabilitation projects, that led to the reconstruction of two schools and three hospitals and the establishment of a vocational center for women in Kashmir.

Currently, she is volunteering to further develop food-security projects (“Adopt a Tandoor” & “Breakfast at Sunrise”) in Islamabad that she had initiated after the onset of the pandemic to fight against the rising levels of post-Covid starvation. The projects focus on using local infrastructure to develop small, self-sustainable food banks,converting flower gardens into vegetable patches, and learning how to harvest rainwater for long-term sustainability.

Laura is an anthropologist researching how life is rebuilt after conflict and crisis. She has an MA in the Anthropology of Conflict, and is currently finishing her PhD in Social Anthropology, at the University of Kent in the School of Anthropology and Conservation. Laura’s PhD research is centred around the themes of reproduction, population and environment in Timor-Leste, where she has conducted almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork.

She has broader interests in South-east Asia and the Pacific, medical anthropology, anthropology of conflict, as well as gender, sexuality and reproductive politics. Alongside academic research, ethnographic fieldwork and teaching, Laura has experience working and conducting research with NGOs on social justice and human rights issues in the UK, Asia and South America.

Dr. Sara Gilani has received an MBBS from University of Health Sciences (Pakistan) and MSc Epidemiology from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK). She has been involved in online teaching for Public Health programs for five years and has taught modules on Research Methods, Epidemiology and Population Health.

Her research areas include Non-communicable disease epidemiology and public perception on health issues. She has worked in population survey research for over ten years for Gallup Pakistan, affiliated with Gallup International. Additionally, she has worked on projects related to health, education, social and development sector.

Vidhya is currently a Global and Public Health and Policy PhD student at Queen Mary’s. Her PhD topic and field of interest is exploring the role of social determinants of health in pesticide poisoning among small-holder farmers and the barriers to adopting agroecological principles using an eco-health framework. Prior to her PhD, she completed her MPH at Imperial College London, where for her dissertation she worked alongside a London city council to explore the feasibility of introducing a community health worker project in local wards.

Whilst undertaking her BSc in Global Health at Queen Mary Vidhya also interned for several national and international NGOs and worked on the following topics: addressing dietary NCD risk factors, identifying barriers to healthcare access in LMICs in addition to creating research tools to improve environmental and human health.

Dr. Wiam Alashek has a background in Medicine and graduated from the Faculty of Medicine with a MBBCh. She practiced General Surgery for years before she joined the Department for Community Medicine at the School of Medicine and received a Degree from the Board for Medical Specialities in Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

She has interests in Educational Psychology (MSA) and Strategic Direction and Leadership (Level 8, Chartered Management Institute). Dr. Alashek completed her PhD in Clinical Epidemiology of Renal Disease at the University of Nottingham. She has much experience teaching BSc and MSc students and has led on many different modules including Epidemiology and Statistics, Communicable Diseases, Non-Communicable Diseases, Maternal and Child Health/Nutrition and Disease Management Policy and Practice. She participates in the supervision of students’ projects and BSc & MSc dissertations. Additionally, she is OSCE examiner for Barts School of Medicine. 

Khalil convenes and coordinates the dissertation module. He has 10 years of professional experience in academia, public and private sector, most recently with the Max Planck Institute, Southern Water Services Ltd, and Focal Point Gallery.

A Social Anthropologist by training his recent work explores 'what it means to know' in public health, as well as freelance work advising various projects on mixed methods in 'how to know' in public health. He has a longstanding interest in economies of care and the politics of autonomy.

Dr Russell Kabir is a Public Health Researcher and Academic. He obtained his PhD degree from Middlesex University, UK. He completed his MSc in Research Methods at the same university His first degree was in Bachelor of Dental Surgery from the University of Dhaka. He also completed his master’s in public health from North South University, Bangladesh. As a Public Health Specialist with over 12 years of teaching experience including various universities in the UK. He is currently serving as an Academic Editor for PLOS One, BMC Public Health and Peerj. Dr. Kabir is interested to perform collaborative and interdisciplinary research on public health issues with a special focus on oral health, reproductive health issues, violence against women and ageing related research.

Sinead obtained a BSc in Microbiology and Genetics and PhD in Genetics, and a Master’s in International Public Health. Sinéad has five years’ postdoctoral research experience at UK Medical Research Council. An honorary fellow of University of Edinburgh Medical School, Sinéad has lectured in health policy, and tutored undergraduates and postgraduates.

She edited the scientific journal Trends in Genetics. As Scientific Officer in the Director’s Office at the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer, Sinéad liaised with governing bodies and supported research strategy.

At British Medical Association, Sinéad directed a team supporting effective tobacco policies, negotiated policy manifestos endorsed by medical associations worldwide, and campaigned for a global tobacco control treaty. She authored expert reports and appeared as an expert witness in parliamentary hearings. Sinéad devised an international online course, with input from the World Bank, Johns Hopkins University, WHO, and other partners.

At the International Union Against Cancer, Sinéad established the Global Smokefree Partnership, supporting effective policy through capacity building, grant-making, research and advocacy. At the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease she led a large-scale grants and capacity-building programme, focussing on policy implementation in low- and middle-income countries.

Throughout the course, you will be encouraged to complete a journal to help you reflect on what you’re learning each week. As you progress, you can return to your journal to see how your knowledge and skills are developing.

Completing your journal will help you learn to critically reflect on a problem and plan for how to deal with it better next time, a crucial skill for global health professionals.

Looking back at your journal can also help you see where your passion in the field lies and can lead to ideas for your dissertation and your future career path.