Loneliness and Public Health

HPM 561 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The course will have two major components: an intensive didactic learning curriculum composed of lecture, assigned readings, and discussion, and an experiential team-based collaborative project.
For the didactic portion, students will learn the ‘ins and outs’ of loneliness within the public health landscape, as well as key tools and a framework for developing successful public health interventions. Class discussions will also cover loneliness as it relates to the Post-COVID-19 era and its effect on at-risk populations.

Required and optional readings will be assigned before class. Lectures will be followed by a systematic and engaged unpacking of the material in interactive discussion.
In the collaborative project component of the course, students will form into teams and develop their own effective, scalable and sustainable public health interventions designed to tackle loneliness, with a key emphasis on identifying and eliminating barriers to success and developing measurement models to assess benefit. The group project will culminate in an oral presentation on the final day of class, and the delivery of a written report.