Advanced epidemiology

This 8-day more advanced course focuses on public health surveillance and outbreak investigation, evaluation of tests and critical appraisal. This is done by familiarizing participants with:

• The goals, scope, types, methods, limitations and usefulness of surveillance
• Measures of frequency used when presenting surveillance data (prevalence, (cumulative) incidence rate, case-fatality ratio)
• Measures related to the validity and usefulness of a surveillance system (sensitivity and positive predictive value)
• The steps in the investigation of an outbreak
• The study designs to investigate an outbreak (cohort study or case-control study)
• Measures of association used when investigating an outbreak (relative risk and odds ratio)
• The evaluation of tests in terms of the different forms of reliability and validity
• The (operational) test measures sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value
• The process of critical appraisal of epidemiological studies
• Evidence-Based Practice and systematic reviews
• The epidemiological approach to causation
• The characteristics of the randomized controlled trial design and assessing its methodological quality
• Literature search (PubMed)
• The different problems of error: selection bias, information bias, confounding (and effect modification)