Welcome to Program Planning for Health Behavior Change, a course from the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our goal in this course is to provide you with an overview of the health education/health promotion field and an opportunity to develop skills in needs assessment and program planning. You'll learn why health behavior is such an important contributor to current public health problems and how health education and promotion programs can be used to address these problems. You'll get hands-on experience using the PRECEDE/PROCEED planning framework to conduct a needs assessment and design a health promotion program.

The course faculty includes several guest lecturers who will describe their real-world experiences using behavior change theories and models in their needs assessments and health promotion programs. We will also discuss practical aspects of working in the health promotion field, including issues that arise when working in communities and when dealing with political and ethical issues.

The culminating activity of the course is a PowerPoint session, at which you will display your completed needs assessment and program plan as a poster suitable for presentation at a professional public health meeting. We would like the course material and assignments to be maximally useful to your own personal career development. Therefore, we encourage you to select a project that is based on your own experience or current job responsibilities. We will also work with you individually to help you select an appropriate topic.

I sincerely hope that you'll enjoy the course, and I look forward to working with you. If you have any questions or concerns throughout the term, please feel free to contact me via email.

Andrea C. Gielen, ScD, ScM, CHES, Course Instructor, agielen@jhsph.edu