Are you interested in helping individuals to improve or maintain their health behaviour, health and well-being? Do you like working with a diverse set of groups such as employees, children, older people, patients or even health professionals, and would you like to know how best to address their health problems, how to motivate them to change unhealthy behaviour, find out what reasons they could have for their behaviour? Would you like to contribute to environments and organisations that are conducive to healthy living?

If the answer is yes, then this programme might be the best choice for you.

Why this programme?

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!” For many people, health is one of the most important aspects in their lives. Still, they may engage in behaviours that are risky for their health. Promoting health and preventing diseases are therefore highly recommended, not only for individuals but also in worksite and government settings. Consequently, health education and promotion experts are very important to not only try to understand and analyse unhealthy behaviours, but also to develop, disseminate and evaluate programmes and policies aimed at improving health behaviour and thus health. However, health promotion is not a simple matter of telling people what they are doing wrong. On the contrary, helping people to adopt a healthy lifestyle is quite a challenge, since a mix of personal, environmental, social and political factors influence individual behaviour.

Health Education and Promotion focuses on core elements in the process of understanding and changing health-related behaviour from the individual and environmental perspective.

Using a planned and systematic approach, we firstly focus on understanding why so many people do not perform healthy behaviours, but rather engage in risky behaviours. Secondly, we discuss how we can develop interventions and policies to motivate individuals and groups to adopt healthier choices regarding lifestyle. Thirdly, in this master’s programme you will learn to determine why and how interventions and policies can be implemented and evaluated.

Unique focus on practical skills:

The programme has a unique focus systematic development, evaluation and implementation of health interventions. It's also practice-based with skills training included in each course.

This means you'll not only learn why health education and promotion programmes are (or aren’t) effective. You also learn how to formulate communication strategies and develop, execute and evaluate health interventions. With practical skills training included in each course and the option to conduct your thesis abroad, this programme gives you the theoretical, practical and intercultural toolset you'll need to launch your career.

You learn how to:

• Analyse positive or negative effects of behavioural and environmental factors on the quality of life.
• Formulate specific and testable objectives for health education and promotion programmes and policies.
• Design effective, scientific health promoting programmes and policies.
• Formulate plans for the diffusion and implementation of these programmes and policies.
• Test, evaluate and refine those programmes and policies.
• Develop communication strategies to disseminate programmes to various audiences.

Multidisciplinary:

As an expert in Health Education and Promotion, you have to be familiar with many different aspects of health education. You need to know about topics such as psychology, communication, epidemiology, biomedicine, sociology, political science and statistics.

That’s why the Health Promotion and Education programme is multidisciplinary, and includes those subjects in all courses.

Spend time abroad:

The Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences gives you the opportunity to study abroad in a work placement programme. Imagine skiing down a slope in Switzerland, wandering the streets of Cape Town or taking a weekend hike through the Scottish Highlands, all while studying at a top university. The faculty has approximately 130 partner institutions in more than 40 different countries all over the world. Students return having had the experience of a lifetime: travelling the world, meeting new friends, learning about different cultures, and working to complete their studies.

Small groups = big advantages

As with many Maastricht University programmes, the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences programmes are taught using Problem-Based Learning (PBL). In small tutorial groups of 10 to 12 students, you seek solutions to ‘problems’ taken from real-world situations. Instructors act as facilitators, giving help as it’s needed.

This allows you to build independence and develop problem-solving skills that you’ll need in the field. This active, dynamic and collaborative learning method has one of the highest knowledge retention rates of any instructional method.