Karolinska Institutet Courses

Behavioral Medicine: A Key to Better Health

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Behavioral medicine is the science of changing our behavior, so we as individuals can stay healthy and happy as long as we can. In this course on Behavioral Medicine, you will learn about basic behavioral medicine concepts and explore how they can be applied to help people who need to change specific lifestyle behaviors to attain better health. Working with virtual patient interactions will give you a chance to test behavioral medicine interventions. You will also learn self¬-help tools based on behavioral medicine, for whatever you need to change in your own life. In this updated version of the course, you will also explore innovations in how to deliver the tools of behavioral medicine to patients in primary care and psychiatry, and what kind of content digital tools might need to include.To help people who need to improve their health by changing their behaviors, you will learn about Motivational Interviewing (MI), a counseling style that stimulates behavior change. You will have an opportunity to test basic techniques in MI with a “virtual bartender” who has sleep problems that he is trying to solve by drinking alcohol. The following sections will focus on coping with stress, improving sleep, increasing physical activity and everyday behaviors like hand washing, safer sex and minimizing risky alcohol use.To complete this course, you will need to spend a total of about 30-40 hours. This time covers course videos, follow-up questions to help you remember what you have learned, course reading (mostly open access scientific articles) and homework tasks. Part of the work is for you to do on your own, and part will be together with other participants in the course community.This course is offered in collaboration with EIT Health.

CARE: Age related diseases and disorders

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This course introduces you age-related diseases and disorders that are common in older adults. These include conditions in many parts of the body, like the nervous system, cardiovascular system, musculoskeletal system, and urinary system.This course takes you through interviews with clinical specialists, and lead patients to help you gain a deeper understanding of the common conditions that occur with age. In section one, this course will cover various aspects of dementias and mental health disorders. In section two, we will learn about cardiovascular diseases, stroke, respiratory diseases and diabetes. In section three, we will discover what happens when someone is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, as well as frailty and musculoskeletal disorders. Finally, in secton four, we will go through urological diseases and disorders, as well as cancer, and touch upon behavior change as a support tool.

The Ethics of Biomedicine

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During the five weeks of our course you will look into some of the most interesting and important areas of contemporary bioethics. This course, unlike other courses in bioethics, is primarily directed towards students reading biomedicine and not only medical educations leading to a certain profession, like physicians, nurses, physiotherapists etc. The latter students often have ethical codes specific to their profession. Moreover, much of their ethical training is about ethical problems that arise in the relationship between health care professional and patient. This course is directed to the students who have scientific biomedical training as their main focus. Such students often end up in development and research or at biomedical laboratories. However, they encounter ethical questions in their professional lives as well.Here are a few examples of the ethical questions that will be addressed during the course:How should we use animals or humans in biomedical research? For instance, what level of risk for harm is allowed? What are the rights of privacy or autonomy of patients or research subjects?How should we distribute the benefits and burdens of medical interventions locally and globally?What medical tests should healthcare offer? Are the certain tests, for instance genetic tests, that should not be offered at all?Who should get access to genetic information about an individual that results from a genetic test? Insurance companies? Employers? Researchers? Relatives?Should we use medical interventions only to cure disease or also to improve the functioning of already healthy individuals?In order to tackle these questions in a fruitful way, basic concepts and tools from ethics in general and bioethics in particular is an integral part of the course.

Introduction to Urology

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Urology is the clinical science of diseases within the genitourinary system of males and females. Anatomically it includes diseases in the upper urinary tract like the kidneys and ureters, the lower urinary tract like the urinary bladder and urethra, and the male inner and outer genitals like the prostate, testicles and the epididymis. Many of the symptoms from these organs belong to the top 100 most common symptoms for which patients seek help. This course will set you on a path to a basic understanding of the most common symptoms from the genitourinary system.You might think that urology merely is a surgical specialty but that opinion couldn’t be more wrong. Today urology is a speciality including numerous new and common non-surgical and pharmacotherapeutic alternatives. Our goal for participants taking this course is to gain knowledge and instill confidence in basic clinical reasoning within the urological field. The course will include clinically relevant cases. Please follow us using #KIUrologyX

CARE: Supporting Older Adult Personal Care & Independence - Part 1 of 2

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This course covers the basics of what makes a great caregiver. Understanding that both adapting a caregiving mindset and practicing regular safety routines are necessary for providing great care.This four-part, self-paced course will introduce the role, practices, and culture of caregiving. It will also introduce the importance of preparation, cleanliness, and common safety practices that should be observed before providing care, especially in sensitive and intimate practices like bathing, showering, or using toileting facilities.

eHealth – Opportunities and Challenges

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KIeHealthX will introduce students to the field of eHealth and its opportunities and challenges. During the course you will get to know the different concepts that are used in the field and learn how it developed historically. This basic knowledge will help you to understand the opportunities and challenges of the field. You will meet different stakeholders from various countries and get to know their views on the opportunities and challenges of eHealth. We will introduce you to eHealth strategies and frameworks for developing and analyzing them. You will get to know methods for eHealth service development and discuss basic requirements that are necessary to achieve sustainable eHealth applications for both clinical professionals and patients.You will see examples of eHealth applications in different contexts and for different users. We will discuss questions such as:What is it that is so unique about the health sector?What factors are important - to avoid failures when implementing eHealth?What are usable tools for care professionals?How can patients best organize and use their own health data to improve their condition?eHealth is a global issue but successful eHealth implementation is very dependent on the local context. At the end of the course you will have a basic understanding what eHealth is and how to set up eHealth strategies and discuss them in your specific context. You will also get to know success factors and pitfalls for the development of sustainable eHealth services and their implementation.This course is offered in collaboration with EIT Health.

An Introduction to Global Health

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Global Health is a new field within public health sciences that integrates the knowledge from fields such as epidemiology, medicine, economy and the behavioral sciences. The main aim of the course, An Introduction to Global Health, is to describe and analyze variation in health between and within countries. This will provide an understanding of causes of the variation. The course will include measurements and determinants of health. Further, the course offers a public health perspective of the global burden of diseases. The course will specifically address: Maternal and Child Health; Sexual reproductive health and rights; Major infectious disease - malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia; Non communicable disease; Mental health; Disasters; Injuries; Health systems and financing; and Health policy. Analysis will be done from a gender and equity perspective.The course combines different teaching methods: lectures, self-study, and exercises using gapminder tools (Gapminder.org) to analyze indicators. An added value is that the course is open to participants from different parts of the world, which creates an intercultural learning and teaching environment.By the end of this course, you should have a good idea of how these key global health challenges are approached by different stakeholders. You will have developed an understanding of what kind of solutions exist today and hopefully you will be curious as to how to make positive difference in the world.

CARE: Introduction to Caregiving for Older Adults

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If you are currently a caregiver or if you expect to become one, you'll want to learn more about supporting the care needs of older adults. This course was designed specifically for you! This course is one of several that were developed to offer the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a role as a caretaker to an older adult. This is a four-part, self-paced interactive course that offers an introduction to caregiving and is designed to complement other courses we offer.

Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trials in Health Care

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For the first hundreds of years of modern medicine, progress was a process of trial and error, and to be honest, it was often fatal error, such as bloodletting, which killed the first US president George Washington. Where diseases were clearly understood, and where treatments obviously worked on most patients, such as penicillin for pneumonia, there was no need to delve deeper into questions of effectiveness. But for most conditions, the treatment benefits were modest and there was a need for improved ways of telling whether a new intervention was better than the previous standard treatment. And so scientists introduced a testing procedure for new treatments - the randomized controlled trial.As the cost of developing new treatments grew, it became very important to detect the slightest improvement that could be attributed to the new drug in order to get it licensed and marketed. So the usual randomized trial was answering the following question: does this treatment work (for otherwise well people with just this single disease, with perfect adherence, treated by the best doctors, under idealised conditions)? But most patients have multiple diseases, imperfect adherence, ordinary doctors and non-ideal circumstances. These patients want to know whether a new treatment is likely to reduce important harms for ordinary people like them, receiving usual care. This mismatch meant that most trials were overestimating the real world effectiveness of new interventions.In this MOOC, we are going to study this mismatch, and see what its effect is on modern medical care. One example of the studies we will discuss is the VIGOR trial. This influential drug trial resulted in the widespread global overuse of this drug, at a cost of wasted billions of dollars. Ironically, this drug, intended to reduce a problem in individuals, ended up causing more of the same problem in the population!After we understand the consequences of designing the wrong kinds of trials, we will also look at how best to design pragmatic randomized trials, which answer the important questions that ordinary patients and decision makers in the real world most often ask. We will also explore how these can be combined with economic evaluations and qualitative research – to answer important questions about how much these interventions cost, and how they are experienced by the recipients.

CARE: Supporting Older Adult Personal Care & Independence - Part 2 of 2

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This course provides tips for day-to-day caregiving in areas like grooming, mobility, and support around the home. This course will help to supplement and refine routine caregiving practices.This four-part, self-paced interactive course will guide you through the recommended steps for assisting older adults with daily tasks. In addition, it will introduce best practices associated with everyday caregiving for older adults with cognitive impairments, like dementia or alzheimers.

CARE: Promotion of Healthy Ageing

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What impact can lifestyle habits have on healthy ageing? Can small changes in our daily routine improve our quality of life and prevent or delay the onset of illnesses in advanced age? What can older adults and their carers do to promote healthy ageing? How can we support health promotion in the elderly population?In Promotion of Healthy Ageing, we will explore key lifestyle-related factors that are modifiable and influential in our well-being in old age, such as diet, physical activity, stress and sleep. By looking closely at the different aspects of lifestyle behaviours and their impact on our health as we get older, we can take action and promote healthy habits in ourselves and those we care for. In this course, we will learn how it is never too late to modify our lifestyle and engage in healthy behaviours, and we will address health promotion strategies for older adults. This is important to keep in mind, especially when caring for older adults who may need support in their everyday lives to reduce their risk for chronic and debilitating diseases, such as dementias, cardiovascular diseases and musculoskeletal conditions, and improve the quality of life. One does not need to be a carer for an older person to benefit from this course, the principles of healthy ageing can be applied to you, your family members, your friends, or any person who wants to commit to an active lifestyle.

Introduction to: Physical Examination and History Taking

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The signs and symptoms experienced by patients often present a puzzle for examiners. This course enables you to perform key examination techniques and properly assess all relevant organ symptoms, increasing the likelihood of a correct diagnosis. In addition to students and professionals in the medical and healthcare fields, everyone is welcome to participate.History Taking is an important part of the examination process. This course teaches the skills needed to select the appropriate questions. Moreover, the course will discuss how to build a trustworthy patient/physician interaction.The course is led by Stephan L. Haas, Senior Consultant in Gastroenterology and Assistant Professor at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. He has more than 15 years experience in teaching physical examination and History Taking.