Public Health

The consecutive Master of Science in Public Health is carried out jointly by the institutions involved in the BSPH: Alice Salomon Hochschule, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Technische Universität Berlin. Each institution brings its own professional expertise to the course.

Public health, also known as health sciences, deals in practice, research and teaching with the conditions for health and the management of illness, insofar as they are based on the natural, technical and social environment of people.

Various factors influence the health of a population. The health system, the supply structures, the financing of health services, the political and social framework and also the health behavior of the population play a decisive role. Public health is an interdisciplinary subject that develops solutions for improving the health situation in society as a whole through the scientific cooperation of different disciplines. The current tasks of public health move in the connection of health research, social medicine, health system and health care research and health-related technology assessment.

Epidemiological methods are used for public health in order to analyze the political and economic framework conditions of a population group in terms of health at the population level, to examine the systems of health care, to consider the interactions between people and their environment, to research the social structures and health-related behavior of society and to consider the implementation of medical findings in society as a whole.

Public health has a health-promoting and disease-preventing orientation. The interactive cooperation of different disciplines offers starting points for their implementation. Human biology identifies and recognizes the diseases of our time. Quantitative disciplines such as epidemiology and statistics allow us to see the spread of diseases in populations and risk groups beyond the individual. The social sciences offer insight into social, economic and political structures that help determine the health of population groups. Health-related behaviors and different lifestyles can be further explained through disciplines such as psychology. Educational sciences offer strategies to implement knowledge about health and public health concepts such as 'empowerment' in different population groups.

Public health is practice-oriented. One of the tasks of public health is to have an effect on real conditions and to influence and change them. This can be done by taking on management functions in the healthcare sector, by working on a political level or by researching, evaluating and disseminating health science concepts.