PHDA testimonials

"I found the PHDA 06 was one of the most practical PHDA courses. I was able to apply the skills that I was learning to a program evaluation that I was leading within the Infection and Control Department at Interior Health Authority. Being able to directly apply the knowledge I was gaining in the course made an amazing difference to my skill development. Overall, it was a great learning experience and really provided valuable overarching guidance to my work. It supported my work in finalizing a questionnaire for stakeholders and reporting findings to Interior Health."

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"The course was well structured. Through the course, I learned: a formal approach to developing, structuring and answering a research question using administrative data; how to clearly define the study population; how to develop a flow chart to illustrate, and guide, the development of an analytical dataset; and SAS skills. It was an excellent course and a good refresher for me, as it has been 5 years since I’ve done data analysis. A number of course assignments required me to pair with a fellow student and undergo peer review of one another’s code. It was interesting to see how my peer structured their code to produce their dataset. I enjoyed and learned a lot from this exchange. The flexibility of distance learning meant that it was possible to complete work at my own pace and schedule. It was also helpful to learn from students in different locations, who worked in related fields but had different strengths, skills and perspectives.

Finally, this course gave me experience working with administrative datasets and tools that can be difficult to access on the job. The opportunity to work with samples of real data exposed me to some of the challenges I could face at work in learning, cleaning, formatting and analyzing the data. I would highly recommend this course and the PHDA program to my colleagues. It’s a well-structured and organized program and provides a good theoretical and practical approach to population health data analysis."

"The Secure Research Training Lab (SRTL) was the best. It was a bit complicated to start with for the first time, but I quickly got used to logging on and working in the environment. It’s well worth the effort to be able to do hands-on work with data, with peer and instructor support, and very good technical support (the few times I needed it).

Another strength of the program is being able to work with motivated and knowledgeable peers, learn from one another through well-moderated forum discussions and collaboration. Having dedicated and clear instructors who are patient with distance ed/online format was also a major advantage. Although you are only required to take four courses to achieve the certificate, I took all six courses available. I felt all courses were very positive experiences for me, with top notch students and teachers who were very engaged and supportive."

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"I took the Population Health and GIS (PHDA 03) course and loved it! The opportunity to work with GIS technology and expand my skill set in this area was invaluable. It also helped to visualize the outbreak work I had been doing previously, and increase my understanding of what happens in these scenarios.

I plan to focus my work more specifically on infectious diseases, and the GIS skills I learned will be invaluable for visualizing and understanding their impacts more concretely.

There is great support by both the instructor and the course administrators. All of my questions were answered promptly and thoroughly. The coursework was challenging, but manageable for students like me working full time. The assignments were also very engaging, and all had practical applications."

"I plan to undertake some mapping of hotspots where illicit drug use is most common. For my interests at this time, I found the longitudinal data analysis course (PHDA 05) and geocoding skills in (PHDA 03) were the most helpful. This is because with increasing use of multiple drugs it is important to determine where outbreaks occur and be able to establish cohorts of people who use these substances and then follow over time determining predictors of change."

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