PUBH5125: Environmental and Social Epidemiology
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Unit of study_

PUBH5125: Environmental and Social Epidemiology

2025 unit information

Throughout our lives, information about our health and the care we receive is recorded and stored across various health-related databases, e.g., hospital admissions, cancer registry. Data linkage is a process that brings together information from various different sources about the same individual, family, place, or event. This process creates a chronological sequence of events that can be combined into a much larger story about the health of people, which can be used for research or to improve health services. This unit is suitable for health services researchers, policy makers, clinical practitioners, biostatisticians, and data managers. We explain how data linkage is conducted, illustrate how data linkage can be used for research, while highlighting the advantages, dangers, and pitfalls. We describe how to design linked data studies, outline the data management steps required before analysis, and discuss some of the methods and issues of analysing linked data. Students will have access to data from a real data linkage and will gain hands-on experience developing their programming skills in R for handling large complex datasets.

Unit details and rules

Managing faculty or University school:

Medicine and Health

Study level Postgraduate
Academic unit Public Health
Credit points 6
Prerequisites:
? 
PUBH5010 or CEPI5100 or BSTA5011
Corequisites:
? 
PUBH5010 or CEPI5100 or BSTA5011
Prohibitions:
? 
None
Assumed knowledge:
? 
None

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

  • LO1. Describe and apply the principles of environmental epidemiology to the assessment of health risks from environmental hazards
  • LO2. Describe and apply epidemiological study designs relevant to environmental hazards including those not frequently used in other epidemiological fields (eg: clinical epidemiology)
  • LO3. Apply the principles of environmental exposure assessment as they relate to individuals and populations incorporating spatial and / or temporal variation in exposure to environmental hazards.
  • LO4. Identify sources of measurement error in exposure, health outcomes and confounders, describe methods for minimising bias and appreciate the implications of these issues for environmental epidemiological analyses and interpretation of study results.
  • LO5. Identify and critically appraise environmental epidemiological literature on potential environmental hazards to health
  • LO6. Appreciate the importance of different subdisciplines in environmental epidemiology (eg: exposure science, epidemiology, toxicology, and risk assessment) and potential career opportunities

Unit availability

This section lists the session, attendance modes and locations the unit is available in. There is a unit outline for each of the unit availabilities, which gives you information about the unit including assessment details and a schedule of weekly activities.

The outline is published 2 weeks before the first day of teaching. You can look at previous outlines for a guide to the details of a unit.

Session MoA ?  Location Outline ? 
Semester 1 2025
Online Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney
Outline unavailable
Session MoA ?  Location Outline ? 
Semester 1 2022
Online Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney
Semester 1 2024
Online Camperdown / Darlington, Sydney

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Modes of attendance (MoA)

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