Welcome to the first course of the Participatory Approaches in Public Health specialization. This is made up of three parts which taken together will lead you to be able to choose and apply appropriate participatory approaches in public health research and practice. In this video, you'll learn about the broad concept of participatory approaches, where they've come from and why they're relevant to public health and your future career. When we founded the School of Public Health at Imperial about ten years ago, we held a large launch event showcasing our science and our education. A member of the audience asked the panel, so where are the public in this School of Public Health. It was a great question and one that we will address throughout this specialization. In this introductory lesson, you will learn about the scope of the course, the teaching methods and get to know your instructors. But first, let's explore what participatory approaches have got to do with public health. Public health is the art and science of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts of society. It encompasses a range of approaches including health protection, health care interventions and health improvement, also called health promotion. The World Health Organization describes health promotion as the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health, a definition established at the first International Conference on health promotion, held in Ottawa in 1986. If you haven't read the Ottawa Charter before find it in the resources page and read it now. Although more than three decades old, it is still used to guide public health programs and it includes a section on strengthening community action. Public health is rightly concerned with improving outcomes for the whole population, but that population is made up of individuals, families, communities and social groups. To improve health, we need to involve and engage at all these levels, working with the public. This is where participatory approaches are key. You'll explore the way that different stakeholders, including the public, patients, carers, healthcare practitioners policymakers can all participate in public health research and practice. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries public health was carried out in a very top-down paternalistic way. Experts decided what was best for the public and then told them what to do, whether it was relation to hygiene, nutrition, behavior or interventions such as vaccination. This approach is still very common and dominant in public health. Alongside this top-down approach, there have also been many social movements that are relevant to health, and in particular to its wider determinants such as employment, housing, poverty and social oppression. Trade unionists, indigenous peoples, feminists and anti-colonialist campaigners have often included many health related issues in their social movements to address injustice and inequalities. With participatory approaches in public health, we aim to bring together the public health evidence based on research and scientific inquiry together with the essential knowledge and action of the people whose lives are most affected and who are key to making progressive change happen and improving health. Over recent decades there has also been a shift in clinical medicine away from medical paternalism towards more patient-centered care and patient autonomy, highlighted in the phrase, nothing about me without me. This builds on calls of the disability rights movement in the 1990s for nothing about us without us. You will learn more about the history of participatory practice in a later session. But for now, let's look at the meaning of the term participatory. The Institute of Development Studies defines it as a range of activities with a common thread: enabling ordinary people to play an active and influential part in decisions which affect their lives. This means that people are not just listened to but also heard. So it's about people playing an active role in decisions, but we also mean participatory ways of working. For example, UNICEF talk about participatory approaches for impact evaluation, which means involving stakeholders, particularly the participants in a programme or those affected by a given policy in specific aspects of the evaluation process. Participation can be used in defining problems, designing solutions, conducting research and evaluation and in delivering interventions. So I think it's best seen as a family of approaches and I like this definition used in rural development studies, a family of approaches and methods to enable people to share enhance and analyze their knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act. In the specialization you start with an introductory part, which will equip you with the understanding of the importance of participatory approaches, the role of social and cultural factors in health and examples of how and why participatory approaches are used in public health. You will learn about the key principles and elements, and we will introduce you to a framework to help you to critique particular case studies. Throughout this we'll be asking you to share your own experiences and to learn from each other. Later, you'll cover the particular application of participatory approaches in health research, including patient and public involvement and co-production. You'll then go deeper into particular methods using a range of studies such as action research, realist evaluation and human-centered design. By the end, you'll be able to apply your knowledge to design a participatory approach for a particular public health challenge. We look forward to working with you. [MUSIC]
