This guide is designed as a starting point for faculty to locate open educational resources for use in VCU health sciences courses. Faculty are invited to explore these resources as a way to gain familiarity with OER and to identify potential materials for use in their courses. Just as they evaluate traditional textbooks, faculty are encouraged to evaluate these resources to determine whether they might be a good fit for their courses.
Applegate, J., et al. (2018). Leadership in Healthcare and Public Health. The Ohio State University. https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/pubhhmp6615/
Can leadership be taught? If the answer is yes, then a highly interactive flipped classroom may be an ideal environment. Class time is used for case studies, simulations, interactive content, and working on gaining leadership experience individually and within student groups. The flipped classroom format was utilized for our Spring Course in Healthcare and Public Health Leadership. We asked students and ourselves to answer the following guiding questions: How do I define leadership and why is it important? How do I lead and what is my leadership style? How do I work with others? How do I follow and manage my boss? And how will I improve my leadership? The content utilized to answer these questions comes from six textbooks, case materials, interactive content, research, speakers, and practical experience from all of us as students of leadership and organizational behavior.
Baker, C. (2023). Epidemiology. Virginia Tech Libraries. https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/epidemiology/
Epidemiology is an openly-licensed text designed for medical degree-seeking clinical students without a prior background in public health. Using sports medicine and injury prevention examples and applications, it aims to provide students with the basics of epidemiology terms and concepts and is intended to guide medical school students as they prepare for the USMLE Step 1 Exam and to transition from student to clinician. It includes an introduction to general concepts and terminology of epidemiology, study designs and their relationship to clinical questions, and the use of epidemiology in clinical diagnosis and screening of disease. Concluding sections of the book present sources of errors in epidemiologic studies including bias, confounding, and effect modification. The book is notable for its use of accessible, inclusive figures and examples, and end-of-chapter graphic notes which summarize the chapter visually.
Barrett, D. H., Dawson, A., & Ortmann, L. W. (Eds.). (2016). Public Health Ethics: Global Cases, Practice, and Context. Springer Open. https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/public-health-ethics-global-cases-practice-and-context
Introducing public health ethics poses two special challenges. First, it is a relatively new field that combines public health and practical ethics. Its unfamiliarity requires considerable explanation, yet its scope and emergent qualities make delineation difficult. Moreover, while the early development of public health ethics occurred in a western context, its reach, like public health itself, has become global. A second challenge, then, is to articulate an approach specific enough to provide clear guidance yet sufficiently flexible and encompassing to adapt to global contexts. Broadly speaking, public health ethics helps guide practical decisions affecting population or community health based on scientific evidence and in accordance with accepted values and standards of right and wrong. In these ways, public health ethics builds on its parent disciplines of public health and ethics. This dual inheritance plays out in the definition the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers of public health ethics: “A systematic process to clarify, prioritize, and justify possible courses of public health action based on ethical principles, values and beliefs of stakeholders, and scientific and other information” (CDC 2011). Public health ethics shares with other fields of practical and professional ethics both the general theories of ethics and a common store of ethical principles, values, and beliefs. It differs from these other fields largely in the nature of challenges that public health officials typically encounter and in the ethical frameworks it employs to address these challenges. Frameworks provide methodical approaches or procedures that tailor general ethical theories, principles, values, and beliefs to the specific ethical challenges that arise in a particular field. Although no framework is definitive, many are useful, and some are especially effective in particular contexts. This chapter will conclude by setting forth a straightforward, stepwise ethics framework that provides a tool for analyzing the cases in this volume and, more importantly, one that public health practitioners have found useful in a range of contexts. For a public health practitioner, knowing how to employ an ethics framework to address a range of ethical challenges in public health—a know-how that depends on practice—is the ultimate take-home message.
Bovbjerg, M. L. (2019). Foundations of Epidemiology. Oregon State University. https://open.oregonstate.education/epidemiology/
This book is intended to provide a basic introduction to epidemiologic methods and epidemiologic thinking. After reading this book, you should be able to read an epidemiologic study, understand what the authors did and why, and identify what they found. You will also have the tools to assess the quality of that study—how good is the evidence? What are potential sources of bias, and how might those have affected the results? This book will not teach you enough to be able to design and conduct your own epidemiologic studies—that level of understanding requires several years of specialized training. However, being able to read and understand the scientific literature about human health will allow you to apply that understanding to your own work in a nuanced, sophisticated way.
Hughes, M., Kenmir, A., St-Amant, O., Cosgrove, C., & Sharpe, G. (2021). Introduction to Infection Prevention and Control Practices for the Interprofessional Learner. OER Commons. https://oercommons.org/courses/introduction-to-infection-prevention-and-control-practices-for-the-interprofessional-learner/view
This open educational resource (OER) is designed for novice undergraduate healthcare students learning about infection prevention and control practices. Healthcare practitioners may also find this resource valuable as a review.
This resource is intended to:
guide best practice in infection prevention and control,
facilitate learners’ knowledge about their role and responsibilities as healthcare providers,
present strategies regarding how to break the chain of transmission,
support critical thinking skills on how to prevent hospital-associated infections, and
promote clinical judgment regarding when to apply routine practices and additional precautions guidelines.
Isaranuwatchai, W., Archer, R. A., Teerawattananon, Y., & Culyer, A. J. (2019). Non-communicable Disease Prevention: Best Buys, Wasted Buys and Contestable Buys. Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0195
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide, contributing to over 73% of all deaths annually. Each day NCDs cause more than 100,000 deaths, 80% of which occur in low- and middle-income countries. NCDs, however, are largely preventable, and a great deal of technical knowledge exists about how to prevent and manage them. Why, then, have we, as a global community, not been more successful at reducing this NCD burden? Does a universal problem not have a universal solution?
Created by an international consortium of experts, this informative and accessible book provides practical guidelines, key learning points, and dynamic, real-world case studies to aid NCD program managers, policy officers and decision-makers in low- and middle-income countries, so that they can assess interventions for the prevention and control of NCDs.
Reeve, J. (2023). Biostatistics: Data and Models. Open Illinois. https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/101759/overview
This textbook provides a survey of statistical methods commonly used in the life sciences, an introduction to statistical theory, and significant exposure to the statistical software package SAS 9.4. The textbook is designed for graduate students and upper division undergraduates, and assumes some familiarity with mathematical notation, functions, and algebra. No previous courses in statistics are needed. For those interested in using the software package R, programs similar in function to the SAS ones are also provided. A unique feature of this textbook is the integration of statistical procedures and theory. Most introductory texts present the statistical procedures and a mechanistic explanation of how they work, without discussing the underlying theory. Some knowledge of this theory is essential for students in the life sciences, especially graduate students, and so the textbook uses likelihood theory to explain how parameters are estimated and statistical tests derived. The statistical models for ANOVA, regression, and other common procedures are also presented. These theoretical concepts are presented in both equation and graphical form.
Arcaya, M. (2016). Healthy Cities: Assessing Health Impacts of Policies and Plans | Urban Studies and Planning. MIT OpenCourseWare. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/11-s941-healthy-cities-assessing-health-impacts-of-policies-and-plans-spring-2016/
This class examines the built, psychosocial, economic, and natural environment factors that affect health behaviors and outcomes. Students will be introduced to tools designed to integrate public health considerations into policy making and planning, and will be given hands-on training on the application of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) methodology. This class is designed to prepare graduate students from planning and policy fields to interface with public health organizations, agencies, or advocacy groups in professional contexts.
Demers, P. (2017). Public Health Administration—Northern Essex Community College. SkillsCommons Repository. https://www.skillscommons.org/handle/taaccct/15954
Public health administration 7 week hybrid course - includes syllabus, course objectives, lecture notes, discussions, assignments, case studies, and videos.
Harper, S., & Lynch, J. (2009). Measuring Health Disparities [Text]. OpenMichigan. https://open.umich.edu/find/open-educational-resources/public-health/measuring-health-disparities
Measuring Health Disparities is designed to be accessible to a broad audience of practitioners across all sectors of the public health workforce. In contains audio and interactive elements and focuses on some basic issues for public health practice - how to understand, define, and measure health disparity.
If these resources aren’t exactly what you’re looking for, you can try searching in some of the repositories and aggregators listed on this guide’s homepage.
You can also reach out to your program’s liaison librarian or to the Open Educational Resources Librarian. Your librarians can help you identify resources or discuss the possibility of customizing or creating resources to better fit your needs.
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