Students at the frontlines of policy work: Simulations Course

The Forum’s Simulations Course (HTH SCI 4YY3) offers students the chance to participate in simulated hospital board meetings, cabinet meetings, and World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board meetings, and interact with decision makers. Here students get the chance to see how difficult decisions are made, and experience the pressures that come to bear on the decision makers.

Part of its commitment to prepare action-oriented leaders to address pressing health challenges creatively, the Forum sees these special courses as a way for students to understand the types of decisions that can have an impact on health, the roles of different organizations involved in making these decisions, and the various influences on these decisions.

As part of the course students organize, prepare for and participate in simulations of hospital and Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) board meetings, provincial and federal cabinet meetings, WHO Executive Board meetings, and a UN special session focused on a health topic. Meeting preparation work includes conducting literature reviews and documentary analyses about a health challenge and the context in which a decision about it will have to be made (e.g., hospital catchment area, province or WHO Member State). Students will take on different roles in different simulations.

The course prerequisite is registration in Level III or above of an undergraduate degree program and permission of the instructor. Please email the McMaster Health Forum for more information.

Related courses

Previous Forum Fellow Steve Hoffman teaches a course entitled The Politics and Praxis of Global Health Advocacy (HTH SCI 4ZZ3). This course aims to foster appreciation for the complexity of today's most pressing global health challenges and the ways that various actors work to overcome them. Offered in Winter 2010, it will approach global health not as an altruistic goal, but rather as a complex domain of political praxis with an ever-expanding cast of players, divergent interests and hidden agendas.