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Advancing the public health workforce to achieve organizational excellence
How Can We Best Improve Public Health Training and Measure Its Impact? We Need to Hear from You!

Date: 3/26/2012 2:11 PM

Related Categories: Council on Linkages, Workforce Development

Topic: Council on Linkages, Workforce Development

Tag: Council on Linkages, Evaluation, Public Health Training Impact, Workforce Development, Training

Wendy Braund, MD, MPH, MSEd, State Health Officer and Senior Administrator, Public Health Division, Wyoming Department of Health; Chair, Training Impact Task Force
 
High-quality continuing education is vital to the maintenance of a competent public health workforce. In today’s rapidly changing environment, public health professionals are continually developing their knowledge and skills in order to meet the public health needs of their communities. Maximizing the impact of public health training opportunities facilitates the greatest return on the limited time and other resources available for professional development activities, and measuring the effectiveness of training efforts can both demonstrate the value of those resource investments and improve the quality of future training.
 
Through the Public Health Training Impact (PHTI) initiative, the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice has been working to identify methods and tools to improve and measure the impact of training. Over the past several months, the Training Impact Task Force (Task Force), a group of eleven experts in training and evaluation, has met regularly to draft a document containing strategies and methods for accomplishing this goal. These strategies and methods will be supplemented by tools and references to help public health professionals implement the approaches identified.
 
The Improving and Measuring the Impact of Training document is meant to guide trainers, public health organizations, and sponsors of training in enhancing and evaluating the training process and divides training into five stages: assess, motivate, design, deliver, and evaluate. Based on their experiences, Task Force members believe that using the strategies identified in this document will help improve training outcomes for learners and their organizations; do you agree?
 
Draft Document Available for Review
The current version of the Improving and Measuring the Impact of Training document is available online for public comment. We encourage you to review this draft document and share your feedback on whether the strategies and methods identified are useful and will improve training. Are the strategies clear? Are key items missing? Do you know of great tools to help public health professionals improve their training efforts that should be included? Share your expertise and help strengthen public health training efforts by adding your thoughts in the Comments section below or on the draft document webpage, or by emailing Kathleen Amos at [email protected].
 
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The PHF Pulse Blog welcomes conversations and commentary from contributors. Posts may not necessarily reflect the views of Public Health Foundation.

Comments

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Sara Perry

8/9/2014

The importance of measuring and monitoring healthcare quality is no longer in doubt. Yet quantifying healthcare quality is a complex and challenging procedure for which public and payer demands clearly exceed current capabilities. Health improvement is what public health professionals strive to achieve. To achieve this goal, we can take CPR certification training at Denver and evaluate the effects of public health actions. For further information you may visit here: http://www.cpr-professionals.com/

Ron Bialek

4/3/2012

Planning for success is the key to training. There is much the Task Force has identified that can guide those who develop, deliver, and sponsor training in their efforts to create training that will have a positive impact. Resources often are not available to conduct rigorous evaluations of training, making it even more important to follow a process in developing and delivering training that can best ensure success.

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