Online Master of Health Administration: Course Structure

The Academic Integrity Module will introduce you to academic integrity standards, so you’re informed about how to avoid plagiarism and academic misconduct.  You’ll complete four parts that cover academic misconduct and academic integrity decisions, such as cheating, plagiarism and collusion.  You’ll learn about the text-matching tool, Turnitin, that is used at La Trobe, how to get help and where to go to develop referencing skills.

This subject focuses on understanding the complexity of health care systems around the world through comparing and contrasting their aims and visions, how they are designed, underlying rationales, policies in the context of societal needs and resource demands. The interface between health and politics, economics and social structure will be considered. Students will analyse the comparative advantages and disadvantages of approaches to health care provision in different healthcare contexts. Topics to be covered include principles of health care system design, public and private systems, decentralised health care, centralised control, healthcare financing and national health insurance schemes, and how performance of healthcare systems is evaluated. Themes, issues and trends in health sector reform worldwide are explored.

In this subject, you will examine the strategic decisions, actions and leadership that determine the success of health service organisations. To achieve this, you will focus on the health care system and organisations from the strategic planning and management viewpoint, as well as covering marketing fundamentals and key components of operations management and research essential for decision analysis. Major issues and trends with an impact on the strategic and operations management of health services organisations will be discussed. This subject is designed for you to use much of the material previously covered in other subjects, as well as healthcare management experience to further develop the skills to deal with real life strategic and operational situations. Practical health services management problems relating to strategic planning and management, marketing and operations management are addressed through group projects and exercises.

In this subject, you are introduced to financial management in health services, in particular, systems of finance and budgeting as applied in healthcare.In addition, we review how non-monetary resources are recorded and explore the methods in which organisations secure and manage resources needed, and the financial implications associated with procurement. We explore the difference between organisational and management accounting.Topics covered include; accounting principles, basic analysis and management implications related to financial data and quantitative performance data, and basic techniques of quantitative decision making and operations research for dealing with health service resource utilization decisions. You are also introduced to costing and casemix funding in healthcare. In addition, we introduce the impact of procurement of goods and supplies by health services, including common procurement methods and an exploration of ethics in procurement, otherwise known as probity.

In this subject, students are introduced to human resources management (HRM) and the key organisational behaviours in the health sector. In particular, it situates the function of human resource management inside a broader perspective of management theory and practice. The responsibilities of HRM are identified and discussed. We will also focus on how the broader research in organisational behaviour such as effective teamwork can be applied meaningfully to the health sector.

In this subject, students will acquire practical knowledge of current approaches to the management of safety and quality in health care, and the available evidence of their effectiveness. The major theoretical developments of the twentieth century are reviewed, with a focus on their contribution to current methods and tools for quality improvement and quality assurance. Dilemmas in the conceptualisation and measurement of quality are explored, along with the relationship between quality management and clinical outcomes.

This subject will provides you with an understanding of the role of epidemiology and biostatistics in public health. You will be introduced to the main concepts and methods of epidemiology and biostatistics, sources of population data, and how these are applied to identify and address public health problems. You will be introduced to statistical software packages and learn how to use these to perform statistical analyses. You will learn how to interpret the results of key epidemiological and biostatistical tests.

The aim of this subject is to present an overview of the Australian legal system and legal institutions, and how these relate to health and healthcare. You will be introduced to ethics in public health practice, and to fundamental legal (and ethical) concepts, methods and materials. The subject will provide you with an overview of public health law and other laws affecting the health system and health services. A case-study approach will be used to illustrate the influence of the law on public health and health service provision.

Whether dealing with public health issues or trying to improve the performance of a hospital, many of the issues are complex, seemingly embedded within a web of interconnected and often contested causes. Push on one part of the system and something changes to counter the good work. Complexity is often used as shorthand for intractability. In this subject we consider if systems thinking provides the insights needed to grapple with complexity. Systems thinking is interested in the parts of a system and the connections among those parts, the structures established as a result of those connections and the behaviours those structures allow or discourage. You will examine the notion of systems, as an object of study and a way of thinking that changes the way we might look at health problems and work towards their solution, the language of systems, and its concepts, and some of the methods used to define issues, build consensus for action, and evaluate strategies to address problems.