Now that curricula are being adapted to European Higher Education Area, it is a good time to reorganize the public health content taught in different university programs. This discipline, which was already present in health degrees such as medicine, nursing, pharmacy and veterinary medicine, has been incorporated more and more into other studies such as social work, teaching and industrial relations.
A total of 35 teachers who teach public health courses in Spanish universities met on 21st and 22nd September 2010 at the 21st School of Public Health of Menorca to discuss and seek agreement on the basic content related to this field as it should appear in the degrees of medicine , pharmacy, nursing, nutrition and dietetics, optics and optometry, social work, teaching and industrial relations.
The meeting was organized into eight working groups formed by teachers from the eight above mentioned degrees. Each of them discussed the contents which should be included in various university public health courses, taking as an example a sample of teaching programs from different Spanish universities. From here, a consensus was reached on a set of recommendations to improve the teaching of public health in different degrees. A number of conclusions from this meeting will be included in a future scientific paper.
The meeting to discuss the contents of public health degree programs emerged as a proposal by Fernando G. Benavides, President of the Spanish Epidemiology Society, and Andreu Segura, President of the Spanish Society of Public Health and Health Administration, with the cooperation of the University of Alicante and the Esteve Foundation. M ª Carmen Davo, Carmen Vives, and Carlos Alvarez-Dardet, from the University of Alicante, were responsible for organising the two day meeting.
