Bachelor of Science in Public Health
Housed in the Department of Health and Human Development, Western's Public Health Program is nationally, regionally, and locally recognized, and lives up to its mission: To provide students with a rigorous and dynamic hands-on educational experience that prepares them to effectively and compassionately improve the public’s health and advocate for social justice through community involvement and collaboration.
The Public Health curriculum teaches students the effect of health promotion and education on individuals and their relationships with their environment. Students learn to approach public health using a social ecological perspective, which considers health outcomes as they relate to factors of individual, social, and environmental influence.
Students take public health-focused coursework and classes from interdisciplinary fields including social sciences (e.g., anthropology, psychology, political science, and sociology), and biological and physical sciences (e.g., anatomy and physiology, exercise physiology, and chemistry). Faculty have experience in a wide array of public health topics including but not limited to nutrition, global health, reproductive health, college health, and environmental health.
Western's Public Health Program is accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health as a stand-alone baccalaureate program with two concentrations: Behavioral & Community Health (BCH) or Global & Population Health (GPH). Most of the students’ coursework for two concentrations will be completed as an entire cohort. However, during the last two-quarter of coursework, Public Health students will split into two classes based on their declared concentrations. GPH students focus on the understanding of the emergence and distribution of disease in populations. BCH students focus on health intervention and education, community engagement, and health promotion programming and implementation. BCH students are prepared to succeed on the Certified Health Education Specialist qualifying exam. In fact, Western’s public health students have a CHES examination pass rate higher than that of the national average. Students’ preparation for success on the exam includes knowledge acquisition of public health theory and practice, and extensive participation in individual and team projects that require community engagement and collaboration.
https://www.wwu.edu/majors/public-health
