Medical Sciences and Population Health

Medical sciences and population health brings together two distinct but deeply complementary perspectives on human health. Medical sciences provides the biological and physiological foundations, covering how the body works at the cellular and organ level, how disease processes arise and how biomedical research develops the treatments and diagnostics that clinical medicine depends on. Population health extends the frame to ask why health and illness are distributed unevenly across communities and societies, examining the range of biological, behavioural, environmental, economic and social factors that determine the health outcomes of individuals, groups and entire populations.

At Swansea University, this four-year full-time programme is designed for students who want to be at the forefront of healthcare advancement, engaging with the full breadth of what it means to understand and improve health. You will develop a thorough grounding in the biomedical sciences alongside the epidemiological, social science and policy frameworks that population health requires. The programme develops both the analytical skills needed to work with health data and the understanding of how interventions, policies and healthcare systems affect health outcomes across diverse populations.

The combination equips you to think at both the individual and population levels, a capacity that is increasingly central to professional and research work in health.

Graduates of this programme are well placed for careers across a healthcare sector that increasingly recognises the importance of understanding health at the population level. Public health, health policy, epidemiology, health data science, clinical research, healthcare management and international health organisations are all natural destinations. The NHS, government health agencies, research institutes, pharmaceutical companies and global health bodies all employ graduates with this combination of biomedical and population health expertise.

Postgraduate study in public health, epidemiology, health data science or clinical research is a natural next step.