Social Health Services » Learn More

Social Health Services

Social Health Services courses are geared toward people who are concerned about health in the community and for those who have an interest in health and human services. Your studies will involve researching health issues. For example, looking how social inequalities are produced, nationally and internationally, and their negative effects community health.

Your studies may also cover issues around need and policy – does social policy in New Zealand help those in need and how can policy be bettered? Your courses may also draw on other disciplines that compliment the Social Science basis in a Social Science for Public Health major. These may include looking at: Geography, Anthropology, History, Politics and Sociology.

Health Social Work Practice

Alternatively, you may undertake a degree more closely related to Social Work. Social workers undertake a number of different duties including helping people overcome problems, helping to find resources for people, setting up programmes to offer people assistance, helping to make plans for the future and develop proposals for social policy. A Health Social Work Practice major will prepare you to become a social work practitioner and help people overcome social challenges found in modern society.

Topics you may cover

• The role of social work in community and institutional settings
• Health strategies
• The structure and funding of health
• Skills in facilitating family meetings
• Skills in working with issues of grief, loss and recovery
• The role of social work in the disabled community – interventions relating to ideas of empowerment, advocacy and self-determination
• Theoretical and cultural perspective of grief and loss
• Issues associated with trauma, terminal and chronic illness and suicide
• Theory and practice of public health
• Research techniques
• Maori and Pacific physical and mental health
• Occupational health
• Hazard management
• Urban planning and development
• The psychology of health: understanding health and illness – how they are perceived in the wider community; how we can promote health
• Mental health
• Drugs and alcohol.