Deepen your clinical expertise in tropical medicine and sharpen your decision-making skills for practice in resource-constrained settings
Description
Are you a physician who wants to deepen your expertise in tropical medicine and sharpen your clinical decision-making skills in resource-constrained settings and address current and emerging global health challenges? This postgraduate certificate is designed specifically for you.
The programme combines two complementary courses: Challenges in International Health (CIH), empowers you to transition from patient-oriented approach to a population-oriented approach and Tropical Medicine and Clinical Decision Making (TMCDM), where you will acquire advanced clinical skills to diagnose and manage tropical diseases in low-resource, tropical district hospital environments. Together, they give you a solid foundation to become an agent of change.
Target audience
This certificate is designed for medical doctors, whether you are preparing to work in the Global South, seeking to update your clinical knowledge of tropical medicine, or working in a non-tropical setting with patients who have travelled to or come from endemic regions.
Programme
All sessions take place in person at ITM's Antwerp campus, Monday to Friday. CIH uses a collaborative, action-oriented approach with case studies, debates and peer exchange. TMCDM combines lectures, interactive classes, laboratory practicals and problem-based clinical reasoning exercises. You will benefit from the field expertise of ITM's lecturers, who have extensive experience in low-resource settings across the world.
By the end of this programme, you will be able to:
Assess the burden of major public health problems—including their frequency, severity, inequities, and socio-economic impacts—in both stable and epidemic settings.
Analyse risk factors and determinants of health (ecological, genetic, social, economic, behavioural, and health system related), with particular attention to vulnerable populations.
Design evidence-based, context-appropriate public health interventions for stable and crisis settings, integrating resource constraints, stakeholder perspectives, and implementation challenges.
Critically assess health system performance in terms of access, quality, service organisation, governance, intersectoral collaboration, and crisis preparedness and response.
Assess statements about epidemiology, clinical presentation, diagnosis and management of clinical cases presenting with tropical diseases, HIV, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections, and common paediatric, dermatologic, and gynaecologic conditions in low-resource settings.
Integrate all domain-specific knowledge (epidemiology, clinical, laboratory) to elaborate a sound differential diagnosis and propose adequate clinical management for clinical cases in a hospital with scarce resources in a tropical setting.
Discuss major global health policy issues, including the SDGs and the roles, interactions, and influence of key actors across national and international health governance.
25 ECTS credits
