Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Aims and Learning Outcomes

Learn about

  • Concepts of health and illness
    • Lay and professional understandings of health, illness and disease
    • Concepts of primary and secondary deviance; stigma, disability and handicap
    • Social and structural iatrogenesis
    • Role of medicine in society
    • Social patterns and experiences of illness
    • Social, cultural and psychological factors
  • Social Determinants of health inequalities
    • Economic, psychosocial, educational, nutritional, environmental determinants
    • Measures of deprivation
    • Determinants of inequality – poverty, race, gender
    • Impact of social and political forces
    • Access to health care
    • Impact of social policy
  • Sociology of health and illness
    • Hospitals as social institutions
    • The development of Professions
    • Approaches to health care self-care, family care, community care, self-help groups
    • Decision-making in health behaviour in response to illness and treatments
    • Relationships in childhood – parent child and peer group.