1. Introduction
From the prospective of health, people can be divided into two categories: one, who are currently staying healthy and wish to stay healthy forever and lead a productive lives without being sick and diseased; another, who are currently unhealthy with sickness or diseased and who wish to get rid of sickness and disease to restore health. The task of the nation is to help people of these two categories fulfill their respective wishes. Societies create two kinds of services to cater the wishes, namely public health services to help healthy people to stay healthy, and medical care services to help unhealthy people to get rid of sickness and disease. In a country both of these services are equally important. There are many strategies and innovations have been emerged, including life style changes, biological and chemical and environmental improvement measures that help promote and protect health and prevent and control diseases. Public health system has challenges of translating into action these measures. Despite of people’s wish to stay healthy due to natural and man-made factors people are getting sick or diseased several times in their life span. Therefore
medical care system has challenges to meet the medical and surgical treatment of the sicknesses and diseases. Among these two fractions of challenges it is the responsibility of public health practitioners and professional to meet the first challenge i.e. helping people to stay healthy through promoting health, preventing health risk factors and diseases, protecting health, controlling epidemics and encouraging suspected people for early detection, treatment and compliance to treatment. In current time all the countries including developing, transitional, or industrialized are facing different combinations of epidemiologic, demographic, economic and health systems challenges. Despite of huge revolution and innovations in health sector, health of the people is increasingly challenged. There is a growing need for lifestyle changes,
burden of diseases including communicable, non-communicable, reemerging diseases. In addition there is growing challenges of micronutrient deficiencies and chronic diseases. Therefore, key players in health sector including policy makers need to open their eyes and invest their efforts in public health including development of pakka
(genuine) public health professionals. Such a pakka public health professionals/ practitioners can effectively deal with health of healthy people and help to maintain the healthy status of the people by promoting health, preventing risk factor, disease/illness and injury, protecting health and immune system, control risk factors and epidemics -infections and in case of presence of sign and symptoms, public health professionals encourage people for early diagnosis and compliance to treatment and follow up. Realizing the dire need of the health professionals in public health sectors Purbanchal University has long been initiating Bachelor Program of Public Health (BPH) since 2002 with the aim to prepare professional public health specialties with the highest technical and managerial competencies to work at various levels (Rural, Urban, National and International and Local, Provincial and Federal level 5 Public health programs include functions including problem identification, planning, implementation and evaluation. Public health education programs were running guided by a curriculum focused on developing skills on these functions. While the change is inevitable with advancing time Purbanchal University revised 3 years BPH curriculum into 4 years semester academic course from the year 2012, as an innovative step in producing qualified graduates in health sectors. The new four years/8 semesters curriculum of 2012 has incorporated various new subjects along with the corresponding practical subjects (Practical Skill Development - PSD) which had emphasized on student's practical skill necessary to deliver quality health services. While viewing the currently using curriculum of 2012, some of the theoretical as well as practical subjects are need to be update and specified appropriately to fulfill the changing concept and scope of
public health demands. Therefore, there is an utmost importance to prepare a revised curriculum.
2. Rationale for Curriculum Revision
The current curriculum of Bachelor of Public Health (BPH) was revised in 2012 in line with the Purbanchal University’s policy of extending the duration of the program from three academic years to four years. Since then, the political system of the country has shifted from unitary to federal system, the health, morbidity, mortality and their determinants have been changed and overall the concept, roles and responsibilities of the mid-level public health workforce also have been changed. To suit these changes the current curriculum of BPH 2076 has been developed as revised curriculum.