Abstract
Public health threats evolve faster than most university curricula. Temperature extremes, fire disasters, and other emerging events can rapidly reshape community needs. “Sentinel Pedagogy” is a teaching innovation in public health curriculum design that systematically scans for emerging public health issues and iteratively updates teaching and learning activities within a course, so students engage with current, real-world problems while building practical skills.
During the past two years, sentinel pedagogy has been implemented and tested in CMED 7300: Foundations in Comprehensive Primary Care course at the School of Public Health, The University of Hong Kong. The approach adapts the logic of sentinel surveillance: the educator functions as a curricular “sentinel,” monitoring the local and global health landscape and translating signals into structured teaching and learning experiences. In practice, the model uses a rapid cycle of scan → select → co-design →implement→ reflect, enabling timely, context-informed learning while maintaining coherence with course learning outcomes. The co-design aspect is structured using the Collective Impact framework by Kania & Kramer, aligning students and multisectoral stakeholders around a shared agenda.
Two consecutive iterations of the cycle have demonstrated its transferability across topics. In 2025, the course responded to Hong Kong’s rapidly rising extreme temperature risk by integrating a Heat Health Action Planning workshop series. Students engaged with the public health dimensions of heat, examined preventable harms, and co-created actionable recommendations, culminating in a student-involved Heat Health Summit. In 2026, following a tragic Tai Po fire, the curriculum pivoted to fire safety as a primary care and public health issue. Students participated in a workshop series involving multisectoral stakeholder perspectives and designed primary care-centred fire safety strategies for vulnerable groups, including residents of subdivided units, older adults living alone, and ethnic minority communities.
Distinctive features of sentinel pedagogy include: <br<
(1) an explicit, surveillance-like stance toward emerging events;
(2) speed of curricular response within a semester;
(3) students as co-creators of solutions rather than passive recipients of knowledge; and
(4) a structured co-creation method (Collective Impact) suited to the complex nature of public health problems.
Sentinel pedagogy is also easily implemented within a course as a part of it, while aligning with the course learning outcomes.
The poster will share the conceptual framework, workshop structures and outputs, and practical considerations for educators who wish to adopt rapid-cycle, context-responsive curriculum design in public health education.