Workforce development plans contribute to organizations’ abilities to deliver Essential Public Health Services and improve the health of their communities. Critical components of a workforce development plan identify gaps in staff skills and competence as well as ways to address these gaps. Through TRAIN, the nation’s premier learning network for professionals who protect the public’s health, organizations can create training plans – a group of courses designed to address specific gaps in knowledge, skills, and competence – and direct staff to access and complete those training plans. Implementing training plans in an organization can improve individual competence, fulfill organizational training needs, and lead to a more prepared public health workforce – all components that help meet needs described in organizations’ workforce development plans.

 

The Public Health Foundation (PHF) invites state, tribal, local, and territorial public health departments - as well as other public health, public safety, and emergency preparedness organizations, hospitals, health centers, and community-based organizations - to work directly with PHF in developing web-based training plans and posting them to TRAIN. Through TRAIN, an organization can keep track of learners progressing through the organization’s training plan. TRAIN affiliates - state health departments, public health training centers, educational institutions, and national organizations that have funded a customizable TRAIN portal - have an additional feature that enables them to assign training plans to specific learners. Training plans posted on TRAIN also enable organizations to:

An example of a nationally available training plan on TRAIN is the Community Health Assessment and Improvement Planning training plan, developed by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment’s State Office of Rural Health and the Work Group for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas. The training plan, currently comprised of eight web-based trainings (30 minutes to one hour in length) based on the Community Tool Box, provides guidance for conducting community health assessments and developing improvement plans. Additional modules are expected to be added to this training plan in the future.

 

Please contact PHF’s TRAIN Team if your organization would like to learn more about how you can create, build, and post training plans to TRAIN, or if your organization is interested in becoming a TRAIN affiliate. 

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Please share with us your experiences in developing and using training plans.