Hey, I'm Jack, I'm a third-year single honours GSD student and I'll be talking about the second-year module which is 'Health and Sustainable Development'. It's one of the optional core modules and it's really great. I'll just give an overview of what it contains which will then reflect what you do.

So first you look at some big dominant themes within health and development because it's so huge, many countries have really struggled through not being able to really manage their health burdens that their population suffers from. So you look at things like HIV, Malaria, Tuberculosis, all these kind of big case studies and understanding why they went wrong for these countries and what the main threats they posed to development were. You then move into more contemporary challenges such as environmental health burdens and mental health burdens, more non-communicable diseases (so those are diseases like obesity and stuff like that which can't be transferred from person to person).

This case study approach really helps to set you up for thinking, right, okay, I now know what challenges have been faced and that kind of then leads you into the second portion of the module (so it goes over two terms) and that really delves into... and this is great, so useful for actually the rest of my GSD learning if there's one module that I've used the most in principle across other modules it's this one because you learn about designing policy and why policies do and don't work, so there's a huge focus on behaviour and which I thought was great, behavioural science and looking at societal structures and barriers to why certain desirable health behaviour does or doesn't take place, looking at resistance to certain patterns or access to delivering health aid to people which is massive really and poses a huge kind of barrier to much of the world in terms of their disease burden that they are facing. After that, policy design, stakeholder analysis, all those key things that you really need actually to support the rest of your modules too.

You are assessed predominantly through three means. The first two are the same - those are case study analyses, so you do one in each term. It's roughly a two thousand word report on just a health case study. So explaining it, what happened, what went wrong, what maybe should have happened so suggesting where policy intervention should have gone better and those make up each a total of 50 percent of your grade (at the moment, when I did it anyway) and the second, well third way of assessment is a big 4,000 word research report which is kind of like a mini dissertation. It's set up with like a methodology and a literature review and then your results and your discussion, so much more formal in that way and that's really delving deep into ... again you can take a case study approach that's what I did anyway and talking about a health crisis that took place, analysing it, asking a question about it, so that's where it's different - you're not just explaining it you've actually got a research question and you're answering that question with maybe some more quantitative or qualitative measures.

That is basically a quick synopsis of what you do really really great, would recommend, it really underpins a lot of your learning on GSD.