Humanities and Social Sciences
November 19, 2024 2025-03-10 18:06Humanities and Social Sciences
Humanities and Social Sciences Department
The Department is responsible for designing and teaching courses in Humanities and Social Sciences for the medical degree (MBBS-MGHD) at UGHE. One of the University’s major tenets is that a focus on the social aspects of health and healthcare should occupy a central position in medical practice. As a branch of an innovative and ground-breaking health sciences university, this department aims to introduce a new generation of African medical doctors, to approach care delivery with compassion and with a commitment to equity and social justice.
The importance of humanities and social sciences in medical education, therefore, cannot be underestimated. In the words of Paul Farmer, they are “re-socializing disciplines” par excellence, i.e. disciplines that allow us to gain a deep and fine-grained knowledge of issues of health and healthcare in a wide variety of past and present societies and local contexts.
About us
Taught by UGHE faculty, with the support of the university’s partner institutions; Harvard University and Vassar College, the ‘Foundations in Social Medicine semester’ (preparatory phase) of the MBBS-MGHD degree, immerses students in this kind of knowledge through a curriculum of these courses:
- IT and Health
- African History and Political Economy
- Critical Thinking and Scientific Reasoning
- Writing and Communication Skills
- Introduction to Psychology
- Medical Anthropology and Social Medicine
- Community-based Education
- Introduction to Gender and Social Justice
- Kinyarwanda (for international students)
Mission
Our vision is to be a cutting-edge academic department experimenting with new ways of integrating courses in the humanities and social sciences with the basic and clinical science courses that form the backbone of medical education.
Vision
Our mission is to educate well-rounded medical doctors to become conversant in a range of humanities and social sciences, while acquiring a holistic understanding of health and healthcare.
Key aims
- Equipping medical students with a broad foundational knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, which is relevant to clinical and social medicine, and to global health
- Ensuring that students become critical thinkers who can evaluate arguments and evidence in research and medical practice
- Enabling students to analyze how large-scale historical, political, social, economic and cultural forces influence the present-day health of patients
- Ensuring that students have a clear understanding of ways to avoid plagiarism in academic writing
