Health Studies (HLST) 405

Overview

This senior-level three credit course is designed for students with a reasonably good understanding of health and medicine. The course provides an in-depth understanding of the following issues:

• the use and misuse of science in the development and evaluation of medical procedures, including diagnostic tests, surgery, and drug treatment
• why many medical procedures come into medical practice despite being ineffective or excessively expensive relative to the benefit they bring about
• why health-care budgets have seen rapid increases over the past three decades.
• how excessive health-care spending can be constrained.

Course Outline

Unit 1: The Challenge of Rising Health Care Spending in Canada

Unit 2: Setting Limits on Health Care Spending

Unit 3: Cost-Effectiveness and the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease

Unit 4: Medical Research: Problems That Arise in Clinical Trials

Unit 5: The Approval and Marketing of Drugs

Unit 6: Excessive Use of Medical Treatments I

Unit 7: Excessive Use of Medical Treatments II

Unit 8: Cancer Screening

Unit 9: Solutions to Overspending: Therapeutic Substitution of Drugs

Unit 10: The Role of Prevention in Health Care

Unit 11: Putting It All Together

Evaluation

To receive credit for HLST 405, you must complete all three assignments and receive a mark of at least 60% on each, receive a mark of at least 55% on the examination and obtain a overall course grade of at least “C-” (60%). The assignments and weighting of the composite grade is as follows:

Assignment 1	Assignment 2	Assignment 3	Exam	Total
10%	15%	25%	50%	100%

To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University's online Calendar.