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With regard to Health, the specific courses on offer are the Masters in Executive Hospital Management, which provides wide-ranging knowledge on planning, finance, insurance and provision of health services; the Masters in Planning and Design of Health Centres; the Masters in ICT Health Systems, which aims to introduce the use of new technologies into healthcare processes, and the Masters in Nutrition and Health. These courses add to those already on offer at the UOC: Telemedicine, Clinical Management, and Health System Governance and Management.

As José Esteban, Area Director, states, “it was necessary to roll out a wide range of training options to help consolidate the rapid evolution of professional profiles in the field; ie, planning and design of health centres, executive management of hospitals, clinical management, ICT health systems, telemedicine, analysis and management of resources and equipment, nutrition or planning and management of training projects in the ambit of health”.

Likewise, GEE is to start up the Executive MBA (EMBA) programme, designed to offer participants interdisciplinary skills that allow them to use their knowledge effectively when making decisions in the world of business; the Social MBA programme, which looks to train students who want to learn more about social entrepreneurship and offer professional opportunities for those who want to apply their knowledge to the world of business in the social sector, and the Global Margin Management (GMM) postgraduate course, which is aimed principally at all those management positions in companies that are immersed in decision-making processes and who, thus, have to be accountable for the results of their actions.

Salvador Estapé, Academic Director of Global Executive Education, states that having solid understanding of the disciplines related to management and dominating the company’s functional areas is not enough in the globalised world we now live in. According to Estapé, “we cannot limit ourselves to applying pre-established models; we have to be able to create new, more powerful models to capture the world of business in all its complexity”. Thus, “the GEE programmes have to provide solid knowledge and essential content for the development of the skills, attitudes and values of active 21st-century management”.


Target audience

The Global Executive Education postgraduate programmes are designed for companies’ mid and higher echelons, those in employment and with years of professional experience. The Health Sciences studies, in turn, are designed not only for healthcare professionals, but also for those working in the field of healthcare; ie, veterinaries, pharmacists, biologists, physicists, chemists, psychologists, etc., or people working in the field of healthcare management, including economists, engineers, architects, computer engineers, journalists, etc.


Other new developments at the IGI

The UOC has a wide range of programmes designed to meet the needs and interests of today’s professionals. Its educational model, which is based on the use of an innovative, flexible and customisable methodology, aims to respond to the needs of today’s workers with lifelong learning and constant updates. As well as creating the Health and GEE areas, the postgraduate training offered has also seen other important developments.

The Humanities department has a new specialist course for the academic year 2008-2009, Culture and Society: Studies into Cultural Consumption and Production, which aims to provide students with the key analytical tools to interpret, study and work on the intertwining of culture and society in the modern world. Likewise, the Law and Political Sciences department, in association with Catalan Human Rights Institute, has created a masters on Human Rights and Democracy. This new qualification is designed to cover the need for specialists in human rights and democracy able to incorporate basic aspects of human rights and democracy, such as equality, liberty, solidarity or the principle of respect for human dignity, into professional practice, whether public or private.

This academic year for postgraduate studies, which begins on October 29, will also include the roll-out of the Official Masters in Health and Safety, which has three specialist courses: Safety at Work, Industrial Hygiene, and Applied Psychosociology and Ergonomics. Likewise, the IT, Multimedia and Telecommunications department has decided to expand its range of courses offering certification programmes in Human Capital Management, and Sales and Distribution.