Julie M. Sharp, Health Data and Quality Coordinator, Kane County (IL) Health Department
The Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals (Core Competencies), adopted by the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, provide an opportunity for health departments to assess their workforce development needs. Through self-assessment, individuals, workgroups, and entire departments can identify in which domains they are strongest, and in which domains lie the largest opportunities for improvement.
Assessing workforce development needs, identifying strengths, and determining opportunities for improvement appear to be the easiest part of the process. Once this assessment is complete, health departments must next build a curriculum to remedy gaps and further develop the workforce. A number of resources, including
TRAIN, are available for health departments, but how do we find the best practices among a large number of training resources? How do we assure that these resources are actually improving competence among all of our staff?
A few questions for consideration:
- Once you have identified areas for growth and improvement, what did you do next?
- How have your health departments taken the deficiencies identified in assessing the Core Competencies and developed formal curriculum ideas?
- What innovative strategies have you implemented within practice to build skills, while not making the activity to build competence feel like formal training?
- How do you assure that true competence is achieved, rather than a perception of competence? Do you require staff to demonstrate their competence, and if so, what have you found to be effective ways to assess this competence?
- If we wish to assure competence of the entire public health workforce, we must consider the training needs of all staff. How have you built your workforce development plan with this in mind?
I welcome your thoughts on these questions and look forward to hearing your own questions as we explore how best to build, maintain, and measure competence within the public health workforce. Ideas may be shared publicly in the Comments section below or sent by email to Kathleen Amos at
kamos@phf.org.
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