Julie Sharp, Performance Improvement Specialist, Performance Management and Quality Improvement, Public Health Foundation Since 2001, the
Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals have inspired the development of a number of discipline-specific competency sets, including
Competencies for Applied Epidemiologists in Governmental Public Health Agencies and
Competencies for Public Health Informaticians. A new effort is underway to refine a set of draft competencies for performance improvement (PI) professionals.
Are you a PI professional? If you are engaged in quality improvement, performance management, accreditation, workforce development, or community health assessment and improvement, or if your work seeks to improve individual, program, and organizational performance, you are a performance improvement professional.
Since the end of 2016, the Public Health Foundation (PHF) has been collecting feedback about PI competencies from the public health community. A comprehensive literature review evaluated existing public health competency sets to determine what best practices, critical areas of practice, and resources are necessary to support their development. PHF has also convened the Performance Improvement Competencies subgroup of the
Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals Workgroup (Subgroup), a committee of PI professionals in public health practice and academia. The Subgroup is helping to identify resources for the literature review, and will be providing input on the needs of PI professionals.
We need to hear from you to assure that the PI competencies help to identify skills and needs of the PI workforce. What does it take to be a PI professional? What knowledge, skills and abilities are necessary for PI professionals? Have you developed your own set of competencies for PI professionals? Are you using competencies developed by someone else? What do PI professionals need to help build their skills and competence? Is there training or other professional development you are using to help build PI competencies? Comments and resources shared in the Comments section below will contribute to a comprehensive environmental scan report under development, and influence the refinement and further development the PI competencies.
Several other opportunities to provide feedback on the development of PI Competencies exist, including:
You can provide feedback through May 15, 2017. Share yours and help shape the future of the public health performance improvement workforce.