WCM-Q's new certificate course to focus on population health and wellness

The Institute for Population Health (IPH) at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) has launched a new Certificate in Population Health and Well-being for all interested healthcare professionals.

Data available on chronic illnesses over the past 20 to 25 years highlights a serious health crisis—a pandemic of chronic illness in which people are experiencing premature mortality, and dying earlier due to heart disease, cancer, and other chronic conditions. Chronic pain, disability, and depression are widespread.

Despite these challenges, public health and preventive medicine topics such as lifestyle medicine, environmental health, social determinants of health, and health policy do not typically get addressed in the curric­ula of health professional schools. This means that many physicians and healthcare practitioners treating patients worldwide have not had the benefit of formal training in various com­ponents and subject areas of population health. WCM-Q has made concerted efforts to incorporate these components in its medical curriculum.

The new IPH certificate aims to equip healthcare professionals with key skills and knowledge to promote public health and enhance people's physical, mental, and social well-being in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond.

The certificate program is a 60-hour multidisciplinary and collaborative course that provides training in five domains of population health and wellbeing. These include: health and disease paradigm, population health, and preventive medicine; health quantitative sciences and evidence; healthcare systems and delivery; burden of communicable and non-communicable disease; and optimizing healthcare: what more can we do? Contemporary and emerging topics such as planetary health, digital health, sustainability, and crisis management will also be integrated in the discussions.

Delivered in hybrid form, with both in-person and online components, the course has been designed to be highly interactive, fea­turing a mixture of lectures, seminar discussions, case-based studies, panel discussions, and Q&A ses­sions.

The course is directed by Dr. Ravinder Mamtani, professor of population health sciences and vice dean for population health and lifestyle medicine at WCM-Q, and professor of medicine at the Center for Global Health, and Dr. Sohaila Cheema, associate professor of clinical population health sciences and assistant dean for IPH at WCM-Q.

Dr. Mamtani said: “The greatest impetus is that we al­ready know that population health interventions are effective, and help people live longer and be healthier as they age. We, therefore, feel a very strong moral obligation to promote this approach and view the Certificate in Population Health and Well-being as a great opportu­nity to improve health, well-being, and quality of life for a great many people.”

The course is scheduled to take place on January 21 and 28, and on February 4, 11, 17, and 18, 2023. To register for the program, all interested healthcare professionals should contact iph@qatar-med.cornell.edu before January 5, 2023.