Characterizing the Competencies for Public Health Graduates in Australasia: Protocol for a Mixed-Methods Study

Regional Public Health Training Centers: An Essential Partner in Workforce Development.

SPECIALTY GRAND CHALLENGE article Front. Public Health, 18 July 2013Sec. Public Health Education and Promotion https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2013.00020

Strategies for Enhancing Governmental Public Health Workforce Well-being and Retention.

Background International collaborations are valuable yet often undervalued assets that enhance the quality of public health education and bolster the development of the public health workforce. Objectives The Humphrey Fellowship Program, part of the Fulbright Exchange Program, facilitates mid-career professionals’ visits to US-based host universities for an academic year. Fellows engage in a semi-structured fellowship period to achieve self-defined goals, emphasizing professional development, expanded experience, and intercultural exchange. This study advocates for the program’s contribution to enhancing public health education. Results Currently, two universities host fellows in public health. Over decades, fellows have engaged with faculty and professionals, participated in classes and meetings, visited institutions for development purposes, and completed US-based affiliations, contributing significantly to their own and the public health workforce’s advancement. This interaction-based learning approach aids in navigating social and ethical challenges by fostering a deeper understanding of public and global health issues across countries. Conclusions The Humphrey Fellowship Program in public health stands as a commendable model. Similar initiatives could be beneficially replicated in the European region, leveraging local and global successes to strengthen ties with public health education institutions, student communities, and beyond. Key messages • Programs that facilitate international interactions can enhance public health professionals’ understanding of global perspectives. • The Humphrey Fellowship Program in the US stands as a commendable practice for mid-career public health professionals, contributing significant value to the education at host universities.

Public health leaders are working to rebuild the US public health workforce. Master of Public Health (MPH) programs have a stake in this, given their role in educating and training public health practitioners. Over the last 10 years, MPH programs have implemented changes to program structure, content, and approach, but workforce gaps persist. This study sought to explore the factors that inform and influence MPH program design and changes they make in order to elucidate how MPH programs may be further engaged to help address current and future public health workforce needs. Sequential mixed-methods study. US MPH programs accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH), and applicants approved to seek accreditation. In total, 115 representatives representing at least 43% of the 215 accredited/applicant MPH programs in the United States. Factors that inform and influence programmatic and curricular changes within MPH programs. The shifts that MPH programs have made to program focus and the approaches used to support student competence development are influenced by individual, programmatic, institutional, and national factors, including faculty and staff background, access to resources, program team/faculty culture, access to resources, program placement, university priorities, and national policies. Most influential in catalyzing changes made by MPH programs between 2015 and 2020 were CEPH MPH accreditation standards, feedback from interested parties, learning best practices, university initiatives, and access to resources including funding and faculty. Identified factors served as facilitators and/or as barriers, depending on the context. There are multiple levers at different levels that may be utilized by national public health leaders, university administrators, and program constituents to effect change within MPH programs, helping them to be even better positioned to help address public health workforce needs of today and tomorrow.

In Australia, consistent with the global picture, the development of a multidisciplinary public health workforce and its education have evolved, mainly because of government reforms driven by comprehensive social initiatives. Recent polycrises – natural and man-made disasters and crises – shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of the Australian public health effort and its workforce education. Internationally accepted and recently redeveloped multidisciplinary competencies are available, however Australian public health education is not routinely accredited, and much of the public health workforce lacks appropriate education and training. Public health qualifications are not routinely required for the public health workforce so, for graduates, appropriate work is hard to find. Academic public health staff are driven by metrics, that do not measure education quality or appropriateness of the content. In the current era of polycrises as well as rapidly evolving scientific knowledge, public health education providers must work in tandem with governments to prepare a workforce ready to deliver essential public health functions with the flexibility to adapt to emerging health challenges, pointing to how education must be developed to ensure an appropriately educated, trained, future-proofed workforce in both the art and science of public health.

Every day in communities across the nation, our public health system and public health workforce are striving to help everyone get and stay healthy.Our public health workforce has worked overtime during the COVID-19 pandemic to protect our communities, and while we are grateful for the temporary emergency funding provided by Congress to help state and local health departments, we know that we must ensure our public health system and workforce

The public health (PH) workforce shortage poses a significant threat to the US population. Despite an increase in PH programs attracting students, there is a need to enhance diversity within local and state PH departments. While internships are recognized as valuable entry points into the PH field, research on the effectiveness of such pathway programs for recruiting diverse candidates is limited. Sponsored by the Connecticut (CT) Department of Public Health and supported by the CDC Crisis Response Cooperative Agreement: COVID-19 Public Health Workforce Supplemental Funding, the CT Public Health Fellowship Program (PHFP) aims to generate interest in PH careers by placing students in high-quality fellowship positions in CT. Third- or fourth-year undergraduates and graduate students enrolled in PH programs receive administrative support, one-on-one coaching, orientation, and a $3500 stipend to facilitate their internships. From January 2023 to May 2024, 97 out of 205 applicants were admitted to the PHFP. Acceptance was on a rolling basis, accommodating academic schedules, personal limitations such as work/family obligation or transportation access, and host agency capacities. We analyzed program data from PHFP applications. Chi-square tests and t-tests were conducted to assess differences between PHFP fellows and non-fellows. The results were not statistically significant. Additionally, fellows were compared to a representative sample of PH students from the US, New England, and CT. The PHFP has a strong potential to help replenish and diversify the PH workforce and enhance health equity. Future research should examine the long-term impacts of such PH experiential learning initiatives on a large scale.

IntroductionRecent UK health policies identified nurses as key contributors to the social justice agenda of reducing health inequalities, on the assumption that all nurses understand and wish to contribute to public health. Following this policy shift, public health content within pre-registration nursing curricula increased. However, public health nurse educators (PHNEs) had various backgrounds, and some had limited formal public health training, or involvement in or understanding of policy required to contribute effectively to it. Their knowledge of this subject, their understanding and interpretation of how it could be taught, was not fully understood.MethodologyThis research aimed to understand how public health nurse educators’ professional knowledge could be conceptualised and to develop a substantive theory of their knowledge of teaching public health, using a qualitative data analysis approach. Qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=26) were conducted with eleven university-based PHNEs.ResultsIntegrating public health into all aspects of life was seen as central to the knowing and teaching of public health; this was conceptualised as ‘embodying knowledge’. Participants identified the meaning of embodying knowledge for teaching public health as: (a) possessing a wider vision of health; (b) reflecting and learning from experience; and (c) engaging in appropriate pedagogical practices.ConclusionThe concept of public health can mean different things to different people. The variations of meaning ascribed to public health reflect the various backgrounds from which the public health workforce is drawn. The analysis indicates that PHNEs are embodying knowledge for teaching through critical pedagogy, which involves them engaging in transformative, interpretive and integrative processes to refashion public health concepts; this requires PHNEs who possess a vision of what to teach, know how to teach, and are able to learn from experience. Their vision of public health is influenced by social justice principles in that health inequalities, socioeconomic determinants of health, epidemiology, and policy and politics are seen as essential areas of the public health curriculum. They believe in forms of teaching that achieve social transformation at individual, behavioural and societal levels, while also enabling learners to recognise their capacity to effect change.

Discipline-specific workforce development initiatives have been a focus in recent years. This is due, in part, to competency-based training standards and funding sources that reinforce programmatic silos within state and local health departments. National leadership groups representing the specific disciplines within public health were asked to look beyond their discipline-specific priorities and collectively assess the priorities, needs, and characteristics of the governmental public health workforce. The challenges and opportunities facing the public health workforce and crosscutting priority training needs of the public health workforce as a whole were evaluated. Key informant interviews were conducted with 31 representatives from public health member organizations and federal agencies. Interviews were coded and analyzed for major themes. Next, 10 content briefs were created on the basis of priority areas within workforce development. Finally, an in-person priority setting meeting was held to identify top workforce development needs and priorities across all disciplines within public health. Representatives from 31 of 37 invited public health organizations participated, including representatives from discipline-specific member organizations, from national organizations and from federal agencies. Systems thinking, communicating persuasively, change management, information and analytics, problem solving, and working with diverse populations were the major crosscutting areas prioritized. Decades of categorical funding created a highly specialized and knowledgeable workforce that lacks many of the foundational skills now most in demand. The balance between core and specialty training should be reconsidered.

In an era of diminished resources, public health agencies are being asked to do more with less. Evidence suggests that while revenues at the state and local levels have been flat or increased slightly since 2010, a large number of governmental public health agencies in the United States have been forced to cut programs and/or staff to compensate for the relative paucity of funds at their disposal. At the same time, these agencies have been challenged to effectively deploy diminished resources to develop and implement multi-level interventions in their communities and to address the many determinants of complex chronic diseases, such as diabetes mellitus and heart disease. Infectious diseases like influenza still pose significant threats to public health, placing an additional strain on departmental resources. One way many health departments are addressing the challenge posed by diminished resources is through collaborating with other partners in the public health system to protect community health.

reading through the rich mix of content in this special issue, i was intrigued by a number of things. one was the scaling up of a community health workforce in one country, which is able to reach a staggering 75% of the 160 million population, against a backdrop of a massive deficit in the medical, nursing and midwifery workforce. another was a system in which the direction of travel - in order to meet the daunting challenge of the long-term conditions burden and a public health system 'in disarray' - is seeking transformation to a 'culture of health' with a central role for the 'Community Chief Health Strategist'. i will leave you, the reader, to discover just which of the health systems are taking steps in these directions.it is obvious that the challenges of public health differ across the globe. Generally, lower income countries struggle with the more basic problems of keeping populations free from infectious diseases, while higher income countries tend to have the infrastructure to prevent many infectious diseases, and can respond quickly when there are outbreaks, but face problems of lifestyle and growing older populations with complex needs. and these countries' systems do not exist in isolation from each other. Globalization has brought opportunities for trained health workers to leave their homes and find better paid jobs elsewhere - leaving lower income countries with gaps in provision in already fragile health systems.How do we deploy the public health workforce to respond? this was a question the editorial Board of the journal thought could be a worthy topic, and we set about commissioning papers from around the world. You will find in this issue a collection of papers from different regions, each of which takes some kind of view of the public health workforce.What struck us early on was that we were faced with significant definitional problems. Just what do we mean by the public health workforce anyway? the paper from Malawi1 describes a community midwife assistant workforce operating within the context of the Essential Health Package, which resembles primary and secondary healthcare in a different context, and in other nations would be considered to be outside public health per se. the Spanish public health workforce2 tends to be deployed in occupational health, environmental health and food safety, and fascinatingly includes medics alongside pharmacists and veterinarians. While in Quebec, Canada,3 the spirit of the 1970s collective action is being reawakened so that community organisers work alongside other public health actors such as doctors, epidemiologists and health promotion workers, to reduce health inequalities from the ground up.Vivian lin's discussion of universal health coverage and the public health workforce explores this definitional issue in the context of major worldwide initiatives, and draws our attention to the focus on population health interventions being secondary to that on individual healthcare interventions - a problem many of us in public health experience at regional and local levels as well. …

Undergraduate public health education: a workforce perspective.

The National Board of Public Health Examiners (NBPHE, the Board) is the result of many years of intense discussion about the importance of credentialing within the public health community. The Board is scheduled to begin credentialing graduates of programs and schools of public health accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) in 2008. Among the many activities currently underway to improve public health practice, the Board views credentialing as one pathway to heighten recognition of public health professionals and increase the overall effectiveness of public health practice. The process underway includes developing, preparing, administering, and evaluating a voluntary certification examination that tests whether graduates of CEPH-accredited schools and programs have mastered the core knowledge and skills relevant to contemporary public health practice. This credentialing initiative is occurring at a time of heightened interest in public health education, and an anticipated rapid turnover in the public health workforce. It is fully anticipated that active discussion about the credentialing process will continue as the Board considers the many aspects of this professional transition. The Board wishes to encourage these discussions and welcomes input on any aspects relating to implementation of the credentialing process.

Although previous studies have focused on the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on various professional groups (particularly in the health and nursing care sector), this study aims to close a research gap by assessing perspectives of students and young professionals in epidemiology and public health in Germany in terms of shifts in workload, work content, and related challenges caused by the pandemic. We conducted a cross-sectional survey between mid-February and mid-March 2022. Quantitative data were analyzed via standardized mean differences. Qualitative data based on answers to open-ended questions were analyzed via a qualitative content analysis. Overall, 172 individuals participated in this survey. Results indicate that students felt burdened the most by lack of exchange with other students and lecturers. Study participants employed in public health experienced changes in their employment because they had changes in their work content- and administration, which was accompanied by a high burden due to the workload. Multiple demands that can have an impact on both acquired skills and mental health during the professional qualification phase were mentioned by the participants. Therefore, more in-depth analyses are needed to investigate the impact the pandemic will have on the (future) public health workforce in the long run.