UCL GRAND CHALLENGE OF GLOBAL HEALTH (GCGH)

Our approach to education

Research-led teaching

As a research-led teaching university, we provide a first-rate learning experience based upon high-quality teaching informed by ground-breaking research with a global perspective. 

Our teaching, therefore, is conducted in accordance with the principles underlying our research: our method is holistic; our efforts are evidence-based; our approach is collaborative; our work is action-oriented; our programme is empowering; and our activity promotes equity and security.

Global citizenship

UCL’s commitment to infuse its teaching and learning with the theme of global citizenship is particularly relevant to global-health education.

We seek to prepare our students to respond to the intellectual, social and personal challenges that they will encounter throughout their lives and careers. We wish them to engage with global citizenship, social justice and environmental responsibility, working seamlessly with and within a wide range of countries and cultures.

Breadth of expertise

A UCL education relevant to global health draws upon the breadth of our research and teaching expertise. Students in our biomedical and life-sciences faculties benefit from a fertile intellectual environment in which scientific discovery transforms our understanding of life and health.

Our graduates include students from more than 70 countries and from a variety of professional backgrounds including healthcare workers, health managers, medical doctors, nurses, researchers and non-governmental organisation workers. This increases the capacity for students to learn from each other’s skills, experiences and perspectives.

Our outreach programmes include the annual ‘Lancet’ Lecture, coordinated by the UCL Centre for International Health & Development, and the UCL Institute for Global Health Symposia series.

Transcending disciplines

In education, as in research, world-changing developments occur most often when the expertise and perspectives of different academic disciplines are brought together. The UCL MSc in Global Health bring together all UCL education relating to global health.

In doing so, it will offer a unique, cross-disciplinary perspective on global health – drawing on partnerships between biomedicine and social sciences, humanities, engineering and the built environment. The combination of this varied expertise will shed light on, and provide solutions to, problems such as:

• inequalities arising from political, socio-economic and cultural values, norms, policies and practices
• the social and political causes of disease and pandemics
• underlying management, public-administration and micro-economic reasons for exclusion from healthcare
• factors beyond the control of the healthcare sector, such as urbanisation, pollution and gender inequality
• ineffective interventions by supranational economic and trade bodies.

The programme will empower students to affect change, through the combination of theoretical insight with practical relevance. It will equip them with an advanced analytical ‘tool kit’ to conduct independent applied research. They will be able to synthesise and criticise the main theories, approaches, research, policy and practice in global health generally and in their specific area of technical expertise, such as economics, epidemiology or anthropology.