Health in All Policies: A Case Competition

Case competitions are an established method for enhancing the education of students in public health and health-related professions. However, many existing competitions do not broadly or intentionally integrate students from other professions such as law, engineering, and business. Further, these competitions often focus on sentinel events or on global health concerns. While important issues, such an approach can ignore public health concerns and health disparities occurring in close proximity to the institution(s) involved in the competition. Finally, such competitions may fall short in leveraging local expertise or involving community groups working to address important health concerns. Taking a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach to case competitions can provide important synergistic learning and innovation opportunities to address population health problems.

This paper presents lessons learned from a novel, HiAP-focused interdisciplinary case competition that involved graduate and professional students from both health-related and non-health related disciplines across a major urban research university. Attitudes towards and learning outcomes related to interdisciplinary education, public health, and health disparities as reported by both students and faculty involved in the competition are presented. This paper also shares innovative HiAP approaches to address urban health disparities developed by graduate and professional students in the competition.

 Implications for educators and community leaders include how to engage interdisciplinary students to address pressing public health issues in communities surrounding the academic institution, how to encourage effective participation and collaboration among team members, and how to enhance and expand interdisciplinary education efforts through an interdisciplinary case competition.