Interested in a free on-line course in measuring health disparities?

Measuring Health Disparities 
Michigan Public Health Training Center Social Epidemiology and Population Health

Instructors John W. Lynch, Sam Harper
This course has been made possible through funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration,  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Michigan Public Health Training Center,  Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, and Prevention Research Center of Michigan

Website: http://bit.ly/XCzugt

Cost No Charge Downloadable computer file - before you can download the course, you will need to register.
Once registered, you will be able to immediately install it on your hard drive.

The course is password-protected.

•File size is 68.2 MB and will take about five minutes to download with a high-speed bandwidth.

•To obtain course password, click here. http://bit.ly/PSrJQk  (There is a link to obtain the password, once you begin the computer-based course.)

•Installation instructions. This computer-based course is PC-based and not Macintosh-compatible.

Course Description

This interactive course focuses on some basic issues for public health practice -- how to understand, define and measure health disparity.

This course examines the language of health disparity to come to some common understanding of what that term means, explains key measures of health disparity and shows how to calculate them.

This computer-based course provides a durable tool that is useful to daily activities in the practice of public health.

The material is divided into four content sections.
Parts I and II review what health disparities are, how they are defined, and provide an overview of common issues faced in measuring health disparities.
Parts III and IV introduce users to a range of health disparity measures, providing advantages and disadvantages of each, and discuss how best to use different measures to communicate and evaluate health disparity in our communities.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the first content section (which includes Part I What are Health Disparities? and Part II Issues in Measuring Health Disparities), you will be able to:

•Identify the dimensions of health disparity

•List three definitions of health disparity

•Interpret health disparity in graphical representations of data

•Explain relative and absolute disparity

•Describe how reference groups can affect disparity measurement

By the end of the second content section (which includes Part III Measures of Health Disparities and Part IV Analytic Steps in Measuring Health Disparity), you will be able to:

•Describe at least three complex measures of health disparities

•List strengths and weaknesses of at least three health disparity measures

•Summarize the analytic steps in measuring health disparity

Course Methodology

This course, while self-paced, can be expected to take between two to three hours to complete. The various health disparity measures are explained with interactive slides and audio commentary. Real-world examples illustrate concepts and carefully thought-out exercises help build knowledge.