The recent launch of national public health department accreditation by the Public Health Accreditation Board highlights the importance of maintaining a competent public health workforce. Key to building a sufficient and qualified public health workforce is providing high-quality education to future workers and opportunities for students to explore public health practice - two areas in which the Academic Health Department Learning Community can help health departments succeed.  

 

Develop a Strong Workforce Development Plan with the Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals 

At two recent conferences, PHF President Ron Bialek and Senior Quality Advisor John W. Moran led sessions on how to align health department priorities with core competency development through use of a prioritization matrix, a trusted quality improvement tool. This is the first time a prioritization matrix has been used in conjunction with the core competencies model.

 

A prioritization matrix helps teams narrow down options by comparing choices in the context of key criteria. Prioritizing the best method of cooking tasty popcorn was used as a teaching example so participants could grasp how to assign a weighted score to multiple options to make an informed decision.  

 

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