Key facts

Overview

Presented by the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group, University of Oxford Department of Public health and the Department for Continuing Education, this accredited short course is designed to:

• Increase understanding of the burden of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), their risk factors, determinants and prevention
• Develop specific skills in designing and evaluating prevention strategies
• Provide a forum to share knowledge and experience with participants and faculty

Programme details

Teaching sessions will comprise keynote lectures, fora, group sessions and one-to-one tutorials. A free workshop will be held on the last day (Friday 6 September) to discuss NCD prevention policy development and implementation issues in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) to which all course participants and faculty will be invited. This will be a joint workshop organised by the World Health Organisation and the University of Oxford.

Sessions will include:

• Sunday 1 September

• • Global burden of NCDs and risk factors: Srinath Reddy (Public Health Foundation of India)
  • Have NCDs received adequate attention in developed and developing countries? Mike Rayner (University of Oxford) and Johanna Ralston(tbc) (World Heart Federation)

• Monday 2 September: Problem definition: burden of NCDs and risk factors

• • Conceptual framework for NCD prevention: Mike Rayner and Charlie Foster (University of Oxford)
  • Estimating the burden of NCDs and risk factors: Peter Scarborough (University of Oxford)
  • Modelling data: Simon Capewell (University of Liverpool)
  • Screening and surveillance: Nick Townsend and Prachi Bhatnagar(University of Oxford)
  • Halving premature death: Professor Sir Richard Peto (University of Oxford)

• Tuesday 3 September: Solution generation: NCD prevention strategies and their development

• • NCD prevention strategies: Mike Rayner (University of Oxford)
  • Social, cultural, political and economical determinants of NCDs: Kremlin Wickramasinghe, Prachi Bhatnagar and Nick Townsend (University of Oxford )
  • Tools to prioritise different policy options: Steve Allender and Melanie Nichols (WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention, Deaking University )
  • Role of research in NCD prevention: Peter Scarborough and Colin Mitchell (University of Oxford) and Denis Xavier (St. John's National Academy of Health Sciences- India)

• Wednesday 4 September: Implementation and capacity building with individuals, communities and systems for NCD prevention

• • Implementation of strategies with multiple stakeholders : David Stuckler (University of Oxford)
  • How can health and social care systems be strengthened to aid NCD prevention: Emma Plugge (University of Oxford) and Prasad Katulanda (University of Colombo)
  • Capacity building for NCD prevention: David Matthews (University of Oxford), Harry Rutter (National Obesity Observatory) and Bassam Jarrar (CDC - Atlanta)
  • Knowledge into practice - case studies presented by former participants: Denis Xavier (India), Lola James (Nigeria) and Alexandra Krettek (Sweden)

• Thursday 5 September: Evaluation and case studies

• • Programme evaluation introduction: Charlie Foster and Paul Kelly (University of Oxford)
  • Case studies – NCD prevention strategies and programmes: Gauden Galea (WHO Europe) and Brian Oldenburg(University of Monash)
  • Nature of evidence for NCD prevention: Mike Kelly (National Institute for Clinical Excellence)

• Friday 6 September: Free Workshop jointly organised by the World Health Organization and University of Oxford: Non-Communicable Disease prevention - Policy Development and Implementation Issues in Low and Middle Income Countries.

• • Global policy context, Impact of the high level UN summit: Shanthi Mendis (WHO)
  • Nutrition : Francesco Branca (tbc) (WHO)
  • Tobacco : Douglas Bettcher (tbc) (WHO)
  • Implementation: Gauden Galea (WHO) and Mike Rayner(University of Oxford)
  • Next steps: Speakers from WHO(tbc) and Mike Rayner (University of Oxford)

Please note that this programme is subject to change.

Staff

Dr Mike Rayner

Role: Chair

Mike Rayner is Director of the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group which is based within the Department of Public Health of...more the University of Oxford and which he founded in 1993. The Group carries out research in two areas: firstly the burden of cardiovascular disease (in particular it is responsible for the British Heart Foundation’s series of Coronary Heart Diseases statistics publications and web-pages) and secondly into population based-approaches to the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Mike’s particular research interests are in food labelling, food marketing, food taxes and the relationship between a healthy diet and a sustainable diet.

Mike is also Vice Chair of Sustain and Chair of the Children’s Food Campaign in the UK. He is a trustee of the UK National Heart Forum, a member of the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee of NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence for the UK), Chair of the Nutrition Expert Group for the European Heart Network based in Brussels and a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the International Obesity Task Force. He is also an ordained priest in the Church of England.

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Dr Kremlin Wickramasinghe

Role: Director

Dr. Kremlin Wickramasinghe is a researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group, Department of Public Health,...more University of Oxford and also a DPhil Candidate in Public Health. He works on the Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology project. Kremlin graduated in 2006 with a degree in Bachelor of Medicine Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He completed his Masters in Global Health Science in 2009 from the University of Oxford. Kremlin completed his internship at the World Health Organization Head Quarters in Geneva on the Social Determinants of Health and cardiovascular diseases project.

He is the chair of the Early Career Network (ECN) of the Asia Pacific Academic Consortium for Public Health and serves as an international editorial board member of the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health. He is a collaborator and a member of the international teaching faculty for the US NIH Millennium Promise Award for “Asian Collaboration for Excellence in Non-Communicable Disease” and Fogarty Framework for Global Health Projects. He is the Course-Director of the “Short course on NCD prevention strategies” offered by the University of Oxford.

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Dr Steven Allender

Role: Speaker

Dr Steven Allender is Professor of Public Health and Co- Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at...more Deakin University. Steve holds a jointly funded NHMRC/ Australian Heart Foundation Career Development Fellow and is co-lead (CID) on an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Centre for Research Excellence in Obesity Policy Research and Food Systems. Steve receives lead investigator funding from bodies including the Australian National Preventive Health Agency, the Australian Chronic Disease Prevention and Service Improvement Fund and the European Union International Research Staff Exchange.

Steve holds a number of honorary appointments including:

• Member of the United Kingdom National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Program Development Group Member for a whole system approach to obesity prevention
• Foundation Member World Heart Federation’s Global Working Group (WG) on Policy/Advocacy
• Consultant, Prevention, Health Policy and Epidemiology Section, European Association for Cardiac Prevention and Care
• Honorary Membership Faculty of Public Health. Royal College of Physicians, United Kingdom

The WHO CC is the only one of the more than 900 WHO Collaborating Centres world wide to focus on obesity prevention. Within the WHO CC Steve is the Director of the CO-OPS Collaboration, which was funded in 2007 under the Federal Government’s Learning for Successful Community Initiatives, and since that time has built a strong and significant national network of practitioners and researchers in community-based obesity prevention. This active and dynamic network of over 2000 practitioners promotes best practice in community based obesity prevention and enables dissemination and sharing of lessons learnt in practice. The CO-OPS Collaboration is conducted in partnership between the three leading Australian universities in this area – Deakin University, University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne. See www.co-ops.net.au

Dr Allender previously held the post of Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Public Health at the University of Oxford (2002 -2012). In this post Steve was the lead researcher for the Coronary heart disease statistics project funded by the British Heart Foundation. Steve also holds an Honorary Membership of the Faculty of Public Health, UK Royal College of Physicians and was a founding fellow of the Unit for Bio Cultural Variation and Obesity at the University of Oxford.

Steve has an ongoing programme of research on the burden of disease and obesity prevention. Recent work has seen a particular interest in the emerging burden of chronic disease in developed and developing countries and the possibilities for using complex systems approaches for community based intervention.

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Prachi Bhatnagar

Role: Speaker

Prachi Bhatnagar is a researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at the University of Oxford, and is also studying...more for a DPhil in Public Health with the same group. In her role as a researcher Prachi works on cardiovascular disease epidemiology; for her DPhil she is exploring how ethnicity affects diet and exercise choices in the context of people's local environments. Prachi graduated in 2006 with a degree in Biological Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and graduated with a Masters in Public Health from Imperial College London in 2008.

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Dr Aiden Doherty

Role: Speaker

Dr. Aiden Doherty is a Marie Curie research fellow based in the University of Oxford and also Dublin City University. His expertise is in...more lifestyle data mining. He investigates the use of state-of-art wearable sensing devices in preventive medicine.

Aiden has technological research interests in multimedia indexing & searching, personal wellness applications, inferring lifestyle patterns from energy usage in one's home, etc.

He has done an internship with Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA. Aiden has 40+ peer reviewed publications and given over 30 talks at conferences and invited events. He has released the source code of a lifelogging browsing system, which has already had over 1000 downloads by other researchers in the field.

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Dr Charlie Foster

Role: Speaker

Charlie joined the British Heart Foundation Research Group in October 1998 after working in health promotion for five years. He has extensive...more experience of lecturing, teaching and training principles and methods of evaluation, health behaviour change and health promotion.

He leads two British Heart Foundation funded programmes of research on physical activity and obesity. The aim of both programmes is to improve the quality of the evidence base for basic epidemiology, measurement, correlates, interventions and policy. He has published over ninety academic papers, reviews and reports. He is developing research into new technologies to understand and change behaviours, supported by Microsoft and the British Heart Foundation.

Charlie has also been the Director of the Centre for Public Health Evidence for Physical Activity for NICE, with Loughborough University. Recent research publications include the BMJ, Cochrane Collaboration and Preventive Medicine. Charlie was a co-author the new UK CMO guidelines, published in 2011, Start Active, Stay Active: A report on physical activity from the four home countries. He is currently the Vice Chair of the WHO HEPA Europe Network (European network for the promotion of health-enhancing physical activity) and member of advisory boards to the Government and the WHO. He has an excellent reputation as an international conference speaker, lecturer and teacher and is a faculty member of the prestigious Physical activity and Public Health, run by Centre for Disease Control (Atlanta) & University of South Carolina. Charlie holds honorary academic posts at the Institutes of Human Sciences at the University of Oxford and University of Durham. He is an Adjunct professor at the University of Canberra and an Associate Researcher at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

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Dr Gauden Galea

Role: Speaker

Dr Gauden Galea is Director of Non-communicable Diseases and Health Promotion. He is a public health physician working with the World Health...more Organization since 1998, with experience in the Western Pacific, in WHO Headquarters, and most recently, in the European Region. He has a special interest in the social determinants of NCDs and in the links between non-communicable diseases and the development agenda.

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Prof Mike Kelly

Role: Speaker

Professor Mike Kelly is Director of the Centre of Public Health Excellence at National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.(NICE) where he...more leads on the development of public health guidance. He is a public health practitioner, researcher and academic.

He originally graduated in Social Science from the University of York, holds a Masters degree in Sociology from the University of Leicester, and undertook his PhD in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Dundee. Before joining NICE he was Director of Evidence and Guidance at the Health Development Agency. Professor Kelly has previously held academic posts at the Universities of Leicester, Dundee, Glasgow, Greenwich and Abertay. He is Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow in the General Practice and Primary Care Research Unit, Institute of Public Health, University of Cambridge, Honorary Professor in the Department of Public Health and Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Honorary Professor in Community Based Medicine, in the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, the University of Manchester, Visiting Professor in the School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield, Honorary Professor of Public Health, University of Salford and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Public Health, Primary Care and Food Policy in the School of Community and Health Sciences, City University, London. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.

He has published more than two hundred papers in medical, social scientific and public health journals and is author/ editor of seven books. In 2010 he was awarded the Alwyn Smith Prize of the Faculty of Public Health for his work on cardiovascular disease and alcohol misuse prevention.

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Prof Alexandra Krettek

Role: Speaker

Alexandra Krettek is Professor of Public Health at Nordic School of Public Health NHV and Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Prevention at...more Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She obtained her M.Sc. in Biology from Lund University in 1992 and a PhD in Medicine 1999 from University of Gothenburg in the field of Cardiovascular Prevention. Subsequently, she spent three years as Research Fellow with Prof. Peter Libby at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. Upon her return to Sweden, Alexandra was awarded an Assistant Professor position at the Swedish Research Council which she held from 2003 to 2006. Alexandra is currently involved in community-based studies in both Nepal and Iceland focusing on cardiovascular disease prevention. She supervises both doctoral (PhD and DrPH) and graduate (MPH) students.

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Prof David Matthews

Role: Speaker

David Matthews is currently Professor of Diabetes Medicine, University of Oxford, and is Medical Tutor and Vice Principal at Harris Manchester...more College, Oxford. He is the emeritus founding chairman of the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism.

His academic research interests include mathematical modelling of insulin resistance, homeostatic model assessment of beta-cell function and insulin resistance, ketones, and therapeutic agents in type 2 diabetes. An emerging and vital concern has been the global obesity epidemic – and the pandemic of diabetes. He was a founding trustee of the Oxford Health Alliance – campaigning and researching on chronic disease. He is currently the Director of the Global Alliance for Chronic Disease; a world-wide association of six research councils collaborating in the fight against Chronic Disease. He is Co-Director of the UK Diabetes Research Network. He has authored more than 230 publications and is on the editorial boards of several professional journals.

Recently he has set up a web site of diabetes experiences which is www.diabetes-stories.com. His interest in epidemic chronic disease stems from the concern that we are facing a pandemic of diabetes found in both developing and developed countries. The web site www.oxha.org gives more details of this. The Banting Lecture at Diabetes UK in 2010 was given in recognition of this work.

David Matthews was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was made Senior Scholar. He was an MRC scholar while studying for his DPhil and subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College and the Joan and Richard Doll Senior Research Fellow at Green College.

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Dr Shanti Mendis MBBS MD FRCP FACC

Role: Speaker

Dr Mendis has more than 15 years experience in global health and coordinates the Chronic Disease Prevention and Management unit at the World...more Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland where she is also the Senior Adviser for Cardiovascular Diseases. She was Professor of Medicine, at the Faculty of Medicine and Consultant Physician at the Teaching Hospital, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka at the time of being recruited to WHO as a consultant in 1998. She graduated in Medicine from the University of Sri Lanka with first Class Honours and practiced medicine in England and Scotland for 6 years and obtained her postgraduate qualifications from the UK and post doctoral training in research and cardiology in USA. She has wide experience in implementation research, clinical medicine, undergraduate and post graduate training and global public health.

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Dr Melanie Nichols

Role: Speaker

Melanie is a researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at the University of Oxford. Her current research examines...more the burden of cardiovascular disease across Europe, including associated risk factors and trends over time. Melanie also holds a fractional appointment with Deakin University in Australia, in the WHO Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention. Her previous work has focussed on early childhood obesity and the evaluation of complex community-based interventions.

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Prof Brian Oldenburg

Role: Speaker

Brian Oldenburg (PhD) is Professor of International Public Health and Associate Dean (Global Health and International Campuses) at Monash...more University in Australia. His research program focuses on health policy, global health and the primary and secondary prevention of chronic conditions, such as diabetes and their associated social and behavioural risk factors across the life-course. He has conducted research, teaching and consultancies in countries throughout the regions of Asia, the Pacific and more recently, Africa.

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Professor Sir Richard Peto

Role: Speaker

Sir Richard Peto, epidemiologist and statistician, has contributed much to the decrease in neoplastic, vascular, and respiratory mortality from...more smoking, both in the UK and elsewhere. Currently co-director of the Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU) at the University of Oxford, Professor Peto demonstrated (in collaboration with Richard Doll) the extraordinary extent to which the hazards of persistent cigarette smoking exceed those from the aggregate of all other known causes of cancer. He also showed that for those who manage to stop smoking before age 30 or 40, the eventual long term benefits of cessation are far greater than had previously been thought and thus has effectively argued the importance of cessation in the UK and many other countries. This has had, and continues to have, a direct influence on public policy and adult mortality in many countries.

After gaining a BA in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1965 and an MSc in statistics from the University of London in 1967, Professor Peto began to work on chronic disease epidemiology with Professor Doll and Charles Fletcher. In 1976, 1994, and 2004, Professors Doll and Peto published the 20-year, 40-year, and 50-year follow-ups of the study of smoking and death among British doctors, and in 1981 they published “The Causes of Cancer: quantitative estimates of avoidable risks of cancer in the US today”, which gained worldwide attention. Also in 1981, Professor Peto’s close collaboration with Rory Collins on large scale randomised evidence began, and since 1985 Professors Collins and Peto have co-directed the CTSU, which conducts large studies of the causes and treatment of disease worldwide. During the 1980s they introduced large simple trials, meta-analyses of trials, and correction of epidemiological studies for regression dilution bias, which showed that the real importance of blood pressure and blood cholesterol concentrations had been underestimated. A substantial part of Professor Peto’s epidemiological work has been, and still is, in China (where he was co-PI of a study that interviewed the families of one million people who had died during the 1980s, assessing their smoking habits), India (using similar methods), and Russia (where his large studies with David Zaridze confirming the massive mortality from alcohol have recently helped lead to effective controls). In the UK he collaborates closely with Valerie Beral’s Million Women Study, which in 2012 reported for the first time the full hazards of smoking and benefits of stopping among women.

During the 1970s, Professor Peto introduced the logrank test for analyses of trials and for meta-analyses of trials, particularly those of cancer treatments. The Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group, which he founded in 1985 and still leads, brings together worldwide randomised evidence and has contributed much to evaluating and consolidating the improvements in treatment that have helped decrease UK breast cancer mortality since the 1980s. This decrease is now steep in many countries but is steepest in the UK.

The greatest absolute mortality reductions have come, however, from his studies (with Rory Collins) of medical treatments to reduce vascular mortality and his studies (with Valerie Beral, Richard Doll, Alan Lopez, Mike Thun and others) of smoking, and smoking cessation. Peto won many awards, is one of the world’s most cited medical researchers, and was knighted in 1999 for his services to epidemiology and cancer prevention.

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Professor K. Srinath Reddy

Role: Speaker

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy is presently President, Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and formerly headed the Department of Cardiology at All...more India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He was appointed as the First Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2009 and is also an Adjunct Professor of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. PHFI is engaged in capacity building in Public Health in India through education, training, research, policy development, health communication and advocacy.

Having trained in cardiology and epidemiology, Prof. Reddy has been involved in several major international and national research studies including the INTERSALT global study of blood pressure and electrolytes, INTERHEART global study on risk factors of myocardial infarction, national collaborative studies on epidemiology of coronary heart disease and community control of rheumatic heart disease. Widely regarded as a leader of preventive cardiology at national and international levels, Prof. Reddy has been a researcher, teacher, policy enabler, advocate and activist who has worked to promote cardiovascular health, tobacco control, chronic disease prevention and healthy living across the lifespan. He edited the National Medical Journal of India for 10 years and is on editorial board of several international and national journals. He has more than 300 scientific publications in international and Indian peer reviewed-journals.

He has served on many WHO expert panels and chairs the Foundations Advisory Board of the World Heart Federation. He is a member of World Economic Forum’s Global Health Board. He also chairs the Core Advisory Group on Health and Human Rights for the National Human Rights Commission of India. He is a member of the National Science and Engineering Research Board of Government of India. He is presently chairing the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage, set up by the Planning Commission of India. He also serves as the President, of the National Board of Examinations which deals with post-graduate medical education in India.

His contributions to public health have been recognized through several awards and honours. They include: WHO Director General’s Award for Outstanding Global Leadership in Tobacco Control (World Health Assembly, 2003), Padma Bhushan (Presidential Honour, India, 2005), Queen Elizabeth Medal (Royal Society for Health Promotion, UK, 2005), Luther Terry Medal for Leadership in Tobacco Control (American Cancer Society, 2009), Membership of the US National Academies (Institute of Medicine, 2005), Fellowship of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2009), Fellowship of the Faculty of Public Health, UK (2009), Cutter Lecture (Harvard, 2006), Koplan Lecture (CDC, 2008), Gopalan Oration (2009), Ramalingaswami Oration (2010) and Paul Dudley White Lecture (AHA, 2010), Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) by University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2011) and Dr. NTR Medical University (2o11).

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Dr Harry Rutter

Role: Speaker

Harry Rutter is a public health physician based in Oxford. He is a senior clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical...more Medicine, an adjunct professor of public health at University College Cork, and an honorary senior clinical lecturer at the University of Oxford. He was the founder director of the National Obesity Observatory for England 2007-2011, led the development of the English National Child Measurement Programme childhood obesity surveillance system, chaired the NICE Programme Development Group (PDG) for guidance on measures to promote walking and cycling, was a member of the NICE PDG on preventing obesity, sat on the management group of the Foresight Obesities project and the Department of Health Expert Panel on obesity. He is currently involved in research assessing the social and environmental factors influencing both obesity and physical activity, and the role of evidence and policy in influencing complex system problems.

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Dr Pete Scarborough

Role: Speaker

Dr Pete Scarborough is a senior researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at Oxford University. His research...more fields include the primary prevention of chronic disease through improved nutrition, and the associations between public health and environmental sustainability. Previous work includes investigations of the impact of taxes and subsidies on diet and nutrition; the impact of front-of-pack food labelling; development of a nutrient profile model to regulate broadcast advertising of foods during children's television in the UK; and estimating the health impact of achieving diets with low greenhouse gas emissions. Much of Dr Scarborough's work involves modelling, and he is the lead researcher on a project developing an integrated model of the impact on chronic disease of simultaneous population-level changes in diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption. He is also a course convenor for an MSc module on health, environment and development.

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Dr David Stuckler

Role: Speaker

David Stuckler, MPH, PhD, is a Senior Research Leader in Sociology at University of Oxford and research fellow of the London School of Hygiene and...more Tropical Medicine and Chatham House. He has written over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the economics of global health in The Lancet, British Medical Journal and Nature in addition to other major journals. His book about the global chronic-disease epidemic, Sick Societies, was published by Oxford University Press in September 2011. He is also an author The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, forthcoming with Penguin Press in May 2013. Stuckler has consulted on the political economy of healthcare for WHO and UNICEF, and received grants from the European Centre for Disease Control, Wellcome Trust, and European Research Council on the impact of economic crises on public health. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford on the subjects of global politics, economics and health as well as quantitative methods. His work has featured in The New York Times, The Economist and New Scientist, as well as on the BBC World Service, CNBC and other outlets.

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Dr Nick Townsend

Role: Speaker

Nick is a senior researcher in the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group at Oxford University, where he is the lead on a...more programme of research into the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and associated risk factors in the United Kingdom. This programme of research includes modelling the future burden of CVD, investigations into regional, social, ethnic and temporal trends in CVD and improving estimates of the incidence and other aspects of the burden of CVD. As a part of this programme Nick collaborates with other members of the BHFHPRG on projects studying the promotion of healthy dietary choice and physical activity from a public health perspective, with a particular interest in health promotion in schools. His research has included studying the promotion of healthy eating in secondary schools through a whole school approach, an evaluation of the health promoting schools concept, and analysis of the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), a school based BMI surveillance programme. He has also developed a programme of research into childhood obesity in collaboration with the National Obesity Observatory (NOO) of which he is a member.

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Certification

This course can be taken with or without academic credit. All participants who satisfy the course requirements will receive a Certificate of Attendance. Those opting to take the course for credit and submit an assignment will also receive 20 CATS points at FHEQ Level 7 (postgraduate). Credit points are recognised by employers and universities in the UK and internationally.

The pdf sample above is an illustration only, and the wording will reflect the course and dates attended.

Level and demands

This course will be suitable for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, postgraduate students and other early career level professionals working in the field of NCDs.

Teaching methods

The course will include the following types of sessions:

Lecture and discussion

A presentation from a member of the faculty or an outside speaker followed by a discussion.

Forum

Three or four experts will be invited to share their knowledge and /or experience. Each panel member will make a short presentation of 10 – 15 minutes which will be followed by an interactive session with comments and questions from the audience.

Group work

Participants will be divided in to five groups. Each group will be given a case scenario or a topic to discuss. Each group will make a 5 minute presentation to share their conclusions with the wider group.

One-to-one

Faculty consultation time slots will be available on a daily basis. Participants can use this time to meet with their personal tutors or other members of the teaching team to: discuss their individual projects; clarify any issues in their fields of expertise or to get advice, comments and support for new project ideas. These one-to-one sessions provide a unique opportunity for participants to meet speakers individually.

Individual projects

Each participant will be asked to select one of the following five specific skills that they would like to develop:

• Develop a national level prevention strategy
• Develop a research proposal related to the prevention of NCDs
• Evaluate a prevention programme
• Set up a surveillance and monitoring system
• Initiate a population level awareness campaign

Participants will be assigned to a personal tutor according to the selected skill and will begin to develop a document under the guidance of that tutor.

Accommodation

This event will take place at Exeter College, Oxford, in the very heart of Oxford. Residential and non-residential options available with Gala Dinner and networking opportunities.

Scholarships

Two types of bursaries are available to participants of this course:

Bursaries for those based in low and middle income countries

The first offers bursaries to a limited number of applicants based in low and middle income countries as listed on the Hinari website (applicants from Group A and Group B will be considered). These bursaries will be awarded to successful applicants whose financial situation would prevent them from attending the course. The bursaries have a value of £2,350, covering the full fees and full board accommodation.

British Heart Foundation bursaries

The second type of bursary will be offered by the British Heart Foundation. There will be five places with a value of £2,350 each, covering the full fees and full board accommodation. Applicants from any country can apply for these bursaries and will be awarded to successful applicants whose financial situation would prevent them from attending the course. At least two of these five places will be awarded for applicants who are currently working or studying in the UK /EU.

If you would like to apply for any of these bursaries, please email us at conferences@conted.ox.ac.uk giving:

• your country of residence
• your nationality
• your current position
• your employer's contact details
• a brief CV
• a personal statement describing your job and why you should receive a bursary to attend this course. (500 words maximum)
• a completed course application form

Please note that the deadline for applying for these bursaries is 1 June 2013

Other funding opportunities

Apply for this course

Programmes including this module

This module can be studied as part of these programmes:

• Short courses in health sciences