Sources:
Use a minimum of 10 reputable sources in your critique (at least 5 must be peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, others can be from the WHO, World Bank, and similar caliber sources). The highest quality papers tend to have many more than 10 sources.
Bibliography and in-text citations:
All evidence in your paper must be supported by in-text citations in the form of “(author, date)” and included in the bibliography/references section.
Bibliography and in-text citations should be formatted according to 7th edition APA style guidelines.
Begin with 1-2 paragraphs which introduce us to the country in general, focusing on issues that you believe most impact health.
You’re going to keep it brief. What issues (social, economic, cultural, natural, and political context; recent socioeconomic and political climate; poverty; social inequality; and/or key historical events) most significantly impact health?
Do NOT write a long chronology of political events in the country. Any historical information that you provide should be linked to the current health in the country.
Based on key health metrics and data, present an overall picture of the current state of health in your selected country.
Strong papers will correctly use available metrics in a way that is meaningful and that tells an organized story of health – this is about turning data into words and stories, and correctly interpreting that data.
Your analysis should describe what is happening in the 3 main categories of diseases: non-communicable diseases, diseases of extreme poverty, and accidents/injuries. But it should go beyond just discussing these.
You may also discuss any metrics you want, but we strongly suggest including material on: maternal and infant mortality rates, life expectancy, leading causes of death, DALYs etc.
Make sure that you describe what these metrics mean for the country, and not just list them.
Additionally, where does this country stand in terms of the epidemiological transition model discussed in class?
You might also want to discuss how these metrics have changed over time (are there some diseases or categories of diseases that are worsening or improving), how do they differ by different populations or geographic areas, etc.?
Include a paragraph assessing the quality of available health data (see Suggested Resources below).
Include discussion of quality of data for birth registration and cause of death.
Think about the limits of data (for example, the DALY) and comment on what the data does not tell us. You may want to go back to the second lecture on global health data where we discussed data quality.
Suggested Resources
Peer-reviewed journal articles! Use PubMed, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed — often better than Google Scholar at finding articles on specific topics. If you find a paper in another author’s citations, Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) is a good place to find that specific paper once you know it exists and have the title. NOTE: PubMed is a search engine, it is NOT the name of the publication or journal and it should not be cited in your bibliography.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is a KEY source of data (http://www.healthdata.org/results/country-profiles)
See IHME’s data visualizations, including Financing Global Health, National Health Accounts and other information: http://www.healthdata.org/results/data-visualizations
IHME also has tables that show how the prevalence of specific diseases are changing over time http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/ (click on the colored boxes which are the darkest shade of color and it will show you the percent increase for that disease/health issue. The lightest shade represents those diseases that are decreasing the most rapidly.)
You may want to look at the GBD Country Profile – which you can access from here: https://www.healthdata.org/results/country-profiles