GLOBAL HEALTH EDUCATION AND THE GROWING NEED FOR POLICY-MAKING AND MANAGEMENT TRAINING OF FUTURE HEALTH-RELEVANT PROFESSIONALS

Global health and for health governance have been increasingly recognized as key elements of sustainable development. At the same time, in the last two decades there has been a dramatic increase in the number of public and private actors involved international development cooperation and of the overall complexity of the global health scenario. Traditional competences have become insufficient and there is a growing demand for professionals who combine a thorough understanding of health- related challenges with multidisciplinary training in social sciences, economics, and management. This led, in the last few years, to the mushrooming of courses dedicated to global health and contributing to obtaining an academic degree. We review our recent attempt to innovate the educational offer in global health policy and management, as part of a wider initiative involving a consortium of academic institutions in Italy, and analyse the recent trend in global health education, focusing mainly on interdisciplinary approaches to global health education as those proposed in non-medical schools and to students with no background in health disciplines. We conclude that while global health and development is certainly an emerging area in the higher education systems of many countries, the international offer of graduate programs is highly dominated by programs taught in medical or public health schools, failing to combine health sciences with economic, social, and management sciences. We argue that the multidisciplinary nature of global health education programs should be improved.