Fancy learning more about health? Try taking a course with the Open University.

K100 Understanding Health & Social Care
This course offers a broad practical introduction to health and social care, whether you are engaged in supporting, nursing or caring for others, receive services yourself, or simply have a general interest. Using real examples, it explores the nature of modern caring, the effects of technological, social and political change, and the shift to more flexible, interprofessional ways of working. It develops the intellectual and study skills important to all learners and has been designed in the light of N/SVQ Levels 3 and 4 in Care. A Certificate in Health and Social Care is awarded for successful completion.

This course is also offered with internet tuition and electronic submission and marking of assignments; the course code for that is KZX100.

K203 Working for Health
This course will appeal to anyone who has an interest in health issues, such as the influence of stress, housing and employment on health, the role of complementary medicine, the debate about the relative importance of individual lifestyles and wider public health concerns, and the implications of changes in the NHS. You will explore everyday aspects of health in different cultural, historical and policy settings, and consider some radical ways of enhancing health and healthcare. The course will enable you to appreciate the different models of health and to review your own and alternative standpoints and values in health work.

U205 Health & Disease
This multidisciplinary course examines the contribution of medicine, biology, sociology, history, economics, politics and statistics to worldwide health issues, and develops skills in research methods, interpreting data and writing essays. Themes include disease patterns in industrialized and developing countries, particularly the UK, South Africa and Bangladesh; determinants of illness and disability (poverty, gender, ethnicity, age, social class); human biology, culture and evolution; health from birth to old age; history of health care and health professions; dilemmas in NHS staffing, rationing, funding and evaluation; medical innovations; community care. Case studies include schizophrenia, asthma, AIDS, hysteria, rheumatoid arthritis, TB and heart disease.

A218 Medicine and Society in Europe 1500-1930
This course traces developments in medicine from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, showing how a heritage of medical thought and practice inherited from classical Greece gradually became a recognisably modern medicine. It aims to set medicine in its social, political and economic contexts, looking at the patient's changing experience of illness, their access to care, and the role and identity of healers across Europe. It shows how western medicine interacted with ideas from contemporary science, religion, and other systems of thought. The course provides a fascinating introduction to the last five centuries of medical history.