MFPHMI Part I study guide
MFPHMI Part I · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Membership of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of Ireland Part I (MFPHMI Part I) is the first-stage membership examination associated with the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, one of the faculties and institutes listed within the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland's organisational structure. Candidates are typically doctors preparing for a career in public health medicine who need to demonstrate foundational competence in the discipline before progressing to later stages of membership. The MFPHMI Part I study guide has 4 sections and about 1,410 words.
01Epidemiology
Epidemiology questions test whether you can move fluently between measures of frequency (incidence, prevalence), measures of association (risk ratio, rate ratio, odds ratio), and measures of impact (attributable risk, population attributable fraction). Know that incidence requires a population at risk and a defined time period, whereas prevalence is a snapshot and rises with longer duration of disease.
318 words, about 2 min02Biostatistics
Know the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics, the meaning of a confidence interval (a range of plausible values for the parameter, reflecting precision, not probability that the true value lies inside), and the logic of hypothesis testing (p-value = probability of data at least as extreme assuming the null is true). Understand type I and type II error, power, and how sample size, effect size and variance drive power.
288 words, about 1 min03Health Protection and Communicable Disease Control
Understand the chain of infection (agent, reservoir, portal of exit, mode of transmission, portal of entry, susceptible host) and how interventions break each link. Know the main transmission routes - contact, droplet, airborne, vector-borne, foodborne, bloodborne, vertical - and the corresponding precautions.
271 words, about 1 min04Health Promotion
Know the major models: the Ottawa Charter health promotion actions (build healthy public policy, create supportive environments, strengthen community action, develop personal skills, reorient health services), the health belief model, the transtheoretical (stages of change) model, social cognitive theory, and the socio-ecological model. Be able to match an intervention to a model - for example, using stages of change to design smoking cessation support.
533 words, about 3 min