Understanding and Changing Health Behaviours
Course Information
This is an online course conducted on edX. Each week a new section will be released that will take about 2-3 hours to complete. Free and paid options are available.
Dates: Tuesday, 03 October – Monday, 20 November 2023
Level: Introductory
Overview
Ever wondered what makes people eat unhealthily, not move enough or sleep insufficiently?
Despite widespread knowledge about the benefits of health behaviours, many people do not engage in them. As such, understanding health behaviours and how they come about is receiving increased attention from the private and public sectors.
Through carefully curated content and project work, this course introduces you to key concepts and frameworks you can use to understand and change the health behaviours of individuals and larger populations in various contexts.
Topics include understanding key lifestyle-related health behaviours and their relationship with health and well-being, factors that impact health behaviours, and strategies to improve health behaviours. Knowledge and competencies gained through this course will aid you to address health behaviours in almost any context.
Learning Outcomes
- Describe what health means and what contributes to health
- Explain how key health behaviours relate to health and well-being
- Analyse multi-level factors impacting health behaviours
- Develop strategies to impact health behaviours in various contexts
Course Instructors
Dr Andre Matthias Müller
Lecturer, NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health
Research Areas:
- Physical activity and health
- E- & mHealth
- Ageing
- Sedentary behaviour
- Behavioural health in Asia
View his full profile here.
Dr Lim Boon Tar Raymond
Senior Lecturer, NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health
Research Areas:
- Behavioural science, health promotion, health education and communication
- Evaluation of public health programmes, mixed methods research, qualitative research
- STI/ HIV prevention and control, prediabetes, diabetes
- Workplace health promotion
View his full profile here.
Past Participants’ Testimonial
“I have enjoyed this course so much. It has covered a comprehensive approach to work on health behaviours. It is certainly not an easy area to work on health behaviors on a single approach which is patient education.”
“Thanks for the very insightful introductory course to help me understand the concept health-related health behaviours and approaches to change behavior.”
“What I find most beneficial is learning about the social-ecological model and how targeting more levels results in higher health behavioural impact.”
“I accidentally signed up for this course, after getting a recommendation from a colleague of mine. I would say that it really opened up my mind about behavioural change in general and I have no regrets for signing up for this course.”
“I have learnt the importance of looking at this problem from various perspectives such as individual, community, environmental and policy levels. I need to work with stakeholders to have a better long-term outcome in this areas. Moving forward, I am very motivated to share my learning with my colleagues and look for opportunities to apply these approaches when working with my chronic disease patients. I will need to develop an approach to incorporate this holistic model in my work.”
“It is amazing learning Changing Health behaviours in 7 weeks by e-learning. This course is comprehensive and gives me more understanding from general to specific about health behaviours and how to change it. Thank you to the lecturers.”
Enquiries
- For course fees and enrollment-related enquiries, please reach out to edX at info@edx.org.
- For more information on this programme, please contact us at sph_cpe@nus.edu.sg.
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