DEPARTMENT OF POPULATION AND BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES

The Department of Population and Behavioural Sciences (PBS) is one of the four departments in the School of Public Health. It was established to run three programmes:

• Health promotion
• Population health
• Social determinants of health

However, we are currently running only the Health promotion programme, leading to a bachelor of Public Health (Health promotion).

The department has a staff strength of eight faculty; four are on study leave pursuing their PhD programmes on a full-time basis, while four are on ground, among whom two are also on their PhD programmes, yet teaching various courses in the department and the school. The other two faculty are already having their terminal degrees.
Regarding teaching, our faculty teach both core and elective courses. The departmental elective courses start from level 300, while the core courses cut across all the four levels. So, our faculty teach courses that fall within their competencies, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

ACTIVITIES UNDERTAKEN BY THE DEPARTMENT
Besides teaching, our faculty also take part in research (school, department and individual) and community services.
At the school level, the department is contributing immensely to, and leading the CHPS+ and the Yonsei-UHAS projects amongst others. At the departmental level, we conduct community health needs-assessment amongst others, while at the individual level, we also conduct research in collaboration or in isolation. We are also involved in supervising students in the field when they are doing their vocational training and for their project works.

CHALLENGES FACED BY THE DEPARTMENT

Although I can say categorically that the department is doing well, however, amidst some surmountable challenges as outlined below:

• Lack of office space, which is however not peculiar to PBS alone.
• Lack of equipment, stationery, etc. to work (We always make inputs to the annual budgets, yet we are not having allocations).
• There is the need for an administrative staff and a secretary (The department cannot effectively without these personnel. Their absence makes things very difficult for us).
• Sometimes, the Head of Department of PBS is not part of decision-making in the school. I don’t know about the other heads.
• The department has accreditation to run an MPH programme in Health promotion but has not been able to roll-out the programme. We may need to have a bigger discussion on that. 
• We have also not been able to roll-out the other two programmes at the undergraduate level (Population health and the Social determinants of Health). We also need to discuss more on this.

STRATEGIES FOR THE DEPARTMENT

The main strategy we have adopted in the department that is working well for us is Team-work. We are always working in partnership and in consultation in everything we are doing. Our main focus is our students because they are the main reason we are here. We always try to carry all the students along in the areas of teaching and learning and research.

Generally, I could say so far so good with the Department of PBS. It is still work in progress and a lot still needs to be done to get there.

HOD: Dr Elvis Tarkang