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Challenges in healthcare

Biomedical and Health Interventions

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Why do scientific developments not always successfully address the challenges and needs in healthcare?

In our current time we face many challenges in health care due to new and emerging infectious diseases, changing disease patterns, demographic changes, rising costs of healthcare and globalisation. At the same time, new scientific developments result in innovative products and services, such as novel pharmaceuticals, neurotechnologies and telemedicine. Ideally, the scientific developments would be able to address the current challenges successfully. However, reality sometimes proves otherwise: technical innovations are not taken up by patient groups, vaccination programs are unable to reach proper vaccination levels and societal movements halt further scientific developments. 

With this minor you’ll investigate underlying causes for these undesirable outcomes and think about strategies to create a better match between the needs in healthcare and developments in biomedical and health sciences.

Related Master’s programmes at VU Amsterdam: 

Health Sciences
Management, Policy-Analysis & Entrepeneurship in Health and Life Sciences

Overview courses

  • Future Challenges in Global Health

    The beginning of the course provides you with an overview of both current and future challenges, in addition to scientific advancements in global health. In the practical part of the course, you will use your newly acquired knowledge and apply it in small project teams.

  • Key Strategies in Disability and Neuropathy

    In this course you learn to reflect on various philosophical perspectives related to disability and diversity and think about your own perspective.

  • Clinical Trials and Health Care

    Central in this course is the idea that a systemic perspective, i.e. the involvement of relevant stakeholders in the innovation process, can benefit both quality and successful implementation of new products. In the course, the ins and outs of the process of clinical trials are discussed. How do you do a trial; what actors and factors are involved?

  • Participatory Digital Health Technology Development

    In teams of students, you will study how multimedia applications in health care change expert – patient/user interaction and communication. To this end you will learn how to use different participatory design methodologies in order to develop ICT applications in health care.

  • Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Development

    This course gives insight into the past, current and future preventive health care concerning control of infectious diseases with a focus on vaccination. It will be a mixture between biomedical sciences and health policy and management.