Courses & Opportunities

Course participants will be a mix of students from multiple occupational health professions: industrial and operations engineering, industrial hygiene, occupational epidemiology, and occupational health nursing. Content is focused on IPE Core Competencies (particularly Domain 2: Roles). Learning activities are engaged, interactional, and include peer-to-peer learning, which promotes students learning about, from, and with each other. Format is primarily face to face synchronous learning.

This case discussion focuses on teams-based management of opioid use disorder using medications for opioid use disorder, and specifically buprenorphine. This discussion is offered during the winter team with synchronous participation from all first-year PA students, third-year MD students, and graduating primary care NP/APRN students. Didactic pre-work is individually tailored for all cohorts to ensure students arrive at this discussion maximally prepared to contribute to a meaningful conversation. The interprofessional care model for this disease state is used to discuss management of medications, stigma, access issues, and patient comorbidities.

In the U.S., campus sexual misconduct has health, social, economic, and academic consequences for students. At the same time, universities struggle to fashion effective responses in the face of external political, legal, and social pressure. Students will explore solutions to campus sexual misconduct, drawing on nursing, public policy, law, education, and other disciplines to develop a novel solution to the problem.

In this course, we will explore topics such as the dynamics of campus sexual misconduct, research on its prevalence, its complex legal context, potential physical and psychological health issues experienced by students, the current status of campus policies, related professional ethics issues, and the impact of social identity (such as gender, race, LGBTQ+, class, and age).

With this broad background, we will focus on some of the most vexing issues in this field through our interdisciplinary lens to make findings and recommendations that will form the basis of a capstone experience at the end of

In the U.S., the federal government funds key social services for the poor. However individual states — which are rarely the focus of policy debates about social services — are often responsible for overseeing the provision of those services.

In this class, students will focus on challenges to the delivery of social services in Michigan, including Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).

Students will work in teams to develop creative problem solving skills, collaborate with people from different disciplines, and learn human-centered design skills. They will also engage with, and learn from, a variety of experts. Student teams will apply problem solving skills and incorporate ideas from public policy, law, health sciences, and other fields to develop solutions to challenges associated with delivering social services to vulnerable populations in Michigan.

Despite the fact that the rate of incarceration for women, especially for women of color, has grown at more than double the rate of incarceration for men in the past three decades, there remains a gap in attention paid to issues of gender bias in the criminal-legal system. Further, Michigan does a poor job with cases involving victims’ crimes committed against an abuser or under duress. Using problem solving tools, multi-disciplinary teams will explore why survivors are overlooked by our criminal-legal system, drawing on insights from social work, gender studies, humanities, sciences, policy, and law to develop innovative ways to challenge criminalization of survivors of violence.

This course will challenge students to develop creative approaches to reducing the risk of brain injury in youth and high school football. Students will work in multi-disciplinary teams, under the guidance of the instructors, to conceive and propose novel solutions that draw on insights from law, engineering, medicine, business, ethics, and other relevant fields. Each student team will address a specific sub-topic relative to the course theme. Sub-topics may include: What changes in the rules governing practices, participation, and play should be instituted? What kinds of protective and monitoring equipment should be used, and under what protocols? How should such equipment be financed and distributed? Class time will focus on providing background information and discussion with topical experts. Students are expected to spend additional time outside of class contacting experts and researching scientific and lay materials. At the end of the term, students will present a proposal to an expert review panel.

Each year, roughly 250,000 children enter the foster care system. Studies show lengthy stays in foster care harm children, yet they continue to languish in the system for too long. Kids who leave the system often experience instability in the homes of their birth parents, adoptive parents, and guardians, or on their own if they age out of the system. In this class, multidisciplinary student teams will hear from leading state and national foster care experts, and they will incorporate insights from law, social work, policy, and other fields. Students will also examine systems that contribute to the problem, including courts and child welfare agencies. At the conclusion of the course, students will present identified solutions to key stakeholders who can implement reforms.

It is estimated that up to one third of all victims of human trafficking come into contact with a health care provider during their trafficking and are unrecognized. Health care settings offer a unique opportunity to identify victims of human trafficking and connect them with services and support. In a collaborative, multidisciplinary setting, students will develop innovations to increase the identification of victims of human trafficking in health care settings.

Narratives around combatting human trafficking are narrowly construed, with white cisgender girls typically portrayed as the victims of heteronormative sex trafficking. Such narratives, and interventions meant to aid trafficking victims, overlook LGBTQ+ communities and fail to address their needs. In this class, students will work with stakeholders and incorporate insights from law, social work, public policy, health sciences, and other fields to identify interventions designed to help LGBTQ+ trafficking victims.

In the U.S., the federal government funds key social services for the poor. However, individual states — which are rarely the focus of policy debates about social services — are often responsible for overseeing the provision of those services. In this class, multi-disciplinary student teams will focus on challenges to the delivery of social services in Michigan, including programs like Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and cash assistance. Students will apply problem solving skills, learn from stakeholders and experts, and draw on insights from health sciences, public policy, law, and other fields to develop solutions that improve the delivery of social services to vulnerable populations.