It seems clear that people’s lives can go well or badly. But what is it for one’s life to go well? Does it consist in feeling good more often than feeling bad? Or getting most of what you want? Or does it consist in achievement, friendship, knowledge and a variety of other disparate things? It is highly tempting to think that your happiness matters for how well your life goes. But this raises further questions: what is happiness? Can it be measured? Is it a sensible goal for public policy? This module aims to explore questions such as these.
Conventional laboratory experiments are useful mainly to assist understanding or analysis. Because they are of necessity stereotyped, they are of limited usefulness when a circuit or system must be designed to meet a given specification. The majority of engineering tasks fall into this latter category, and therefore require design or synthesis skills, in addition to the understanding of underlying engineering principles. Students on all Biomedical Engineering pathways will work together on the main design exercises but with a particular focus or task to complete depending on their pathway; either Electronic Systems/Mechatronics for Health or Artificial Intelligence/Digital Health. In this way they will work together to produce a prototype system This module includes individual and team design exercises devised to provide a bridge between 'conventional' experiments and the project work in the third and fourth years, (which in turn provide a bridge to 'real' projects in industry). The exercise has real deadlines and concrete deliverables and students are encouraged to be creative, develop imaginative solutions and to make mistakes. Exercises share common characteristics: • Customer orientated rather than proscriptive specifications are given • Design work carried out, bringing academic knowledge to bear on practical problems • Laboratory sessions are used for development/ construction/ verification of designs • Allow students to demonstrate their communication skills in writing individual and group reports/presentations. In support of these design exercises, those on the Electronic Systems/Mechatronics for Health pathway will be introduced to some advanced programming, simulation, and design modelling frameworks and tools. They will explore the analogue relationship between mechanical and electrical systems, enabling circuit problems and mechanical systems to be treated in the same framework. Combining this with modelling and analysis will develop a better understanding of vibration problems in continuous mechanical systems and allow simulation and visualisation of any mechanical implementation within the design project.
Harmonic analysis extends key ideas of Fourier analysis from Euclidean spaces to general topological groups. A fundamental goal is understanding algebras of functions on a group in terms of elementary functions. These correspond t the idea representing signals in terms of standing waves. Harmonic analysis is now a key part of modern mathematics with important applications in physics and engineering.
Harmonic analysis extends key ideas of Fourier analysis from Euclidean spaces to general topological groups. A fundamental goal is understanding algebras of functions on a group in terms of elementary functions. These correspond to the idea representing signals in terms of standing waves. The Quantum Fourier Transform is a fundamental ingredient in quantum computing algorithms and the module will also give an introduction to key ideas relating to quantum information.
In this module you will build on your previous learning so that you can prioritise and respond to the changing levels of support that people require when health status changes. You will develop your ability to manage and evaluate care across healthcare settings to promote, restore and stablise health status.
In this module students will build on their previous learning so that they can recognise, prioritise and respond to the changing levels of support that children and young people may require when health status changes. Students will develop their ability to recognise deterioration in children and young people's health and then respond to these changes by managing and evaluating care. Students will consider holistic child centered care across healthcare settings to promote, restore and stablise children and young people’s health status.
This module will introduce you to undertaking a structured history taking and physical assessment of children, young people and their families/carers. You will consider the approaches that you take to carry out this assessment including how to communicate effectively with children of a variety of ages and their families/carers. Following this assessment, you will plan how you will develop a plan of care that takes a child centered approach to meet the needs of children and young people and their families/carers. This will then help prepare you to develop essential nursing skills in preparedness for your first clinical placements.
In 1968, Herb Simon published a still influential book called, The Sciences of the Artificial. He wrote, "Everyone designs who devise courses of actions at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one who devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state." One can therefore think of design as a process of understanding how things in the material world (the artificial according to Simon) might be made to attain goals and functions that are useful for people. Design research applies knowledge to solve practical problems that serve human purposes (as opposed to the natural and social sciences that are meant to understand reality). Design thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems and find solutions to problems for people and/or clients. The skills involved in design thinking include empathy (looking at and reading a scene, hearing the voice and understanding the needs of clients; bringing out the best in collaborators; mentoring yourself and others; compassionate leadership), imagination (being able to see patterns in chaos, thriving when faced with constraints), systematic thinking (a feel for abstraction, modeling, planning, evaluating, and recognizing systematic error in judgments and decisions). This module would therefore builds skills through an introduction to current thinking and practice in design to improve safety, experience and effectiveness in health and social care settings, and by bringing in practitioners with real problems that need to be addressed. Our students would work in small teams with practitioners to construct solutions and to evaluate their fitness. We might imagine that in the first part of the module, we would provide students with an understanding of what design is all about, but then quickly put them in an environment where they learn, experience, and apply design thinking to real problems.
This module is about public health and teamworking. It aims to offer student choice and to develop students' professional knowledge, skills, values and behaviour through reflective practice. Further details will be provided on Blackboard.
The growing expertise in health economics at the Department of Economics offers a unique opportunity for the introduction of a health policy and economics module. The importance of health for any human being, the size of the health sector, the limited resources available to meet the needs of an aging population (with higher levels of chronic disease) make health economics an important aspect of everyday life. At the same time, the relevance of health economics to a large number of sectors (e.g. health services, public health, medicine, pharmaceutical and health technology industry) makes this module of direct interest to postgraduate programme in Global Health, Public Health and other health related studies. This module is offered as a compulsory module in the MSc Global Health programme.
Deadly illnesses have frequently been invested with a great deal of symbolic and cultural significance. This interdisciplinary module will introduce you to how various diseases and conditions (AIDS, cancers, obesity, Covid-19, and mental health issues and illnesses) became metaphors for rejection and marginalisation. It analyses the ways in which cultural, medical, political and societal discourses can entwine and impact on the self-representations of the patients. As well as exploring disease-related discrimination and its impact on the self, you will examine anti-discrimination strategies. You will then have the opportunity to put all of this into practice through the development of a socially and politically responsive public engagement project. This highly innovative module is paired with MEDI1032 : Student Selected Unit 2, option Medicine and Culture. Students in this module will thus work for eight weeks with Medical students in order to create public engagement activities through a variety of forms that might typically include posters, exhibitions, educational material for schools, websites, or videos.
The success of physiotherapy treatment is often influenced by the degree to which patients engage with it and adhere to recommended behavioural changes. This usually requires a high degree of effort and motivation on the part of the patient and poor adherence is common. A key task for physiotherapists therefore, is enhancing motivation for behaviour change. Traditional approaches to promoting change involve the provision of ‘expert advice’. Whilst this can work some of the time, particularly for acute problems, not all patients are ready, willing or confident in their ability to change and may not be receptive to it (Rollnick, Miller & Butler 2023). Conversations can therefore easily descend into dysfunctional dialogue which can be frustrating for both physiotherapist and patient. Healthy discussions will teach students how to have constructive, meaningful conversations about change, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes. The module draws heavily on motivational interviewing (MI) as a method for guiding these challenging conversations. Students will also learn how the skills and ‘way of being’ that is central to MI may be used to complete the other aspects of their clinical practice.
This module is intended for students from a range of multidisciplinary health or social care backgrounds who are interested in developing and refining their communication skills as a tool for supporting self-management. Background Supported self-management enables people to develop the knowledge, motivation, confidence and skills to make decisions and act in relation to their health. This includes management of health conditions and promotion of their overall well-being. Health and social care practitioners can develop and apply advanced communication skill to successfully support self-management for client-centred health and well-being gains. Focus Through this module you will critically explore relevant theory to help you appraise and apply communication skills that promote shared decision making, client-led behaviour change, and supported self-management. You will have the opportunity to critically reflect upon your own attitudes and beliefs and evaluate how this influences the effectiveness of your therapeutic approach. Your critical exploration of the underpinning evidence base will advance your understanding of communication in relation to supported self-management. Evidence synthesis, contextualisation, and personal critical reflection are used as learning approaches to develop your therapeutic dialogue skills relevant to your own area of practice. There is a strong practical emphasis throughout the module. This allows you to experiment and apply learning through experiential work, skills-based exercises and structured critical reflection. The skills-based content is heavily informed by motivational interviewing for behaviour change.
This course is designed to introduce the phenomena of heat and mass transfer, to develop methodologies for solving a wide variety of practical engineering problems, and to provide useful information concerning the performance and design of particular systems and processes. A knowledge-based design problem requiring the formulations of solid conduction and fluid convection and numerical computation will be assigned and studied in detail.
This module gives a comprehensive coverage of the classical heat transfer syllables, including steady and transient heat conduction, convection and radiation. While the underlying mathematics are properly elaborated, their conceptual significance and physical interpretations are emphasised and enforced through in-class examples. Numerical methods are introduced for problems in 2-3 dimensions and the use of commercial software such as AnsysTM is introduced. In addition to the traditional analysis of heat exchangers, the application section is expanded to introduce heat transfer engineering at different heat flux and/or temperature differences, with emphasis on energy systems and the thermal management of electronic components/devices.
