WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

The school shall engage in activities other than its offering of degree programs that support the professional development of the public health workforce.

Interpretation. Although the primary educational function of a school of public health is the

preparation of qualified professionals, a school should also address the needs of the large numbers of personnel engaged in public health practice without formal training and previously trained professionals who seek to maintain and advance their knowledge and skills. Assessment of professional needs should be undertaken periodically in public health settings and short-term programs should be developed and made available in easily accessible locales and formats. Schools should collaborate with other institutions that train or employ public health personnel to assess workforce needs and extend continuing education opportunities beyond the school’s own market area.

The growth in certificate programs, both as an organized course sequence to supplement a degree program and as an independent sequence of courses to upgrade skills of non-degree students, is a positive development for the field of public health practice. If a school offers certificate

programs, it should assure adequate academic oversight, appropriate faculty qualifications and 5 |

credentials, truth in advertising and appropriate quality assurance mechanisms.

If the school offers certificate programs, these shall be well defined, accurately described in promotional materials and responsive to identified professional needs. If academic credits earned for the certificate can subsequently be applied to degree requirements, the conditions and limitations for such application should be defined and shared with prospective students at the time of admission to the certificate program.

If the school offers non-degree distance learning opportunities, these shall be responsive to identified professional needs and assure appropriate technological support. Non-degree offerings, regardless of format, should be regularly evaluated.

Required Documentation

This section addresses the training and continuing education needs of individual public health professionals and employees. Please refer to the Service Criterion for the school’s activities focused on capacity-building consultation and technical assistance for public health agencies at the local and state levels.

The School supports workforce development by individual faculty members who conduct continuing education sessions (see Template Table 3.3.1 for listings) and at the departmental level through seminars and colloquia that are open to non-students and non-faculty professionals [DO WE LIST THESE ANYWHERE IN CRITERION 2?].

In the narratives and data presented here, we emphasize the School’s two centers that provide public health workforce development using systematic and formally staffed approaches to needs assessment, curriculum development, program delivery, and evaluation. The GSPH faculty members who lead these two centers have both attained national recognition for their leadership and expertise in public health workforce development.

Public Health Training Center. The School’s primary locus of responsibility for

multidisciplinary, practice-focused workforce development is the Public Health Training Center funded here since 2000 by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). Led by Margaret Potter [INSERT LINK TO CV OR HOT-LINK TO CV], GSPH has housed a PHTC covering Pennsylvania and Ohio through 2005 and subsequently covering Pennsylvania through August 2014. Beginning in September 2014, GSPH won funding to become the Region 3 Public Health Training Center (Region 3 PHTC) covering Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. Its mission is “to improve the nation’s public health system by strengthening the technical, scientific, managerial, and leadership competencies of the current and future public health workforce through the provision of education, training, and consulting services.” The Region 3 PHTC continues the work of its preceding state-focused PHTC by addressing the full spectrum of public health competencies through needs assessment, curriculum development, multi-modal program delivery, and impact evaluation. The training center is a designated provider of continuing education credits for health education, dietetics, public health, nursing, and nursing home administration. The training center partners with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of Social Work and Medicine as well as the 6 |

Pennsylvania Department of Education for continuing education accreditation in their respective disciplines.

An important feature of the school’s current workforce development agenda is to support the pursuit of accreditation of public health agencies. Gerald M. Barron, Deputy Director of the

Center for Public Health Practice, is a site visitor for the Public Health Accreditation Board.

With this expertise, he is providing pre-accreditation consultation and technical assistance to the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the Allegheny County Health Department. With the new Region 3 PHTC, this training resource will be delivered through the Region 3 local performance sites and thus available to health agencies in five states and the District of Columbia.

AIDS Education and Training Center. Additionally, the School is headquarters to the HRSA-

funded Pennsylvania-Mid-Atlantic AIDS Education and Training Center (PA/MA AETC) led by Linda Rose Frank INSERT LINK TO CV]. See Web site for detailed information. The Department of Health and Human Services began to provide funding for the AETCs in 1988. The AETCs are administered by the HRSA, HIV/AIDS Bureau with funding from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Treatment Modernization Act. The PA/MA AETC) has been funded since 1988 and has evolved and expanded to provide training, consultation, and technical assistance to individual health professionals, federally qualified health centers, hospitals, clinics, and healthcare agencies and programs in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and DC. Through intensive, interactive training methods and innovative programming, the PA/MA AETCs dedicated clinical educators shape, improve, and change the practices, attitudes, and behaviors of health care providers. The approaches of engagement, planning, and training intervention employed by the AETC are aimed at increasing inter-professional collaboration to improve HIV care. Thanks to significant in-kind contributions from leading medical centers in the cities in which the PA/MA AETC is based, this network creates a cost- effective, state-of-the-art approach to the training needed to address the HIV/AIDS crisis. These powerhouse academic and research facilities supply renowned faculty and researchers, space, equipment, and administrative support services. The PA/MA AETC has local performance sites in Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

[*]3.3.A. Description of the ways in which the school periodically assesses the continuing

education needs of the community or communities it intends to serve. The assessment may include primary or secondary data collection or data sources.

The Region 3 PHTC is responsible for the school’s systematic, ongoing efforts to assess the training needs of public health workers. Continuing the methods and efforts of the previous state- level PHTC, now extended to all of Region 3, the new PHTC will conduct needs assessments to explore training topics relative to public health competencies, population health needs, and diversity issues; to document private sector involvement with public health activities through the Affordable Care Act (ACA); to confirm what health conditions most affect the region’s

under-served populations, to determine the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of importance to the public health workforce, and to build capacity for health department accreditation. These

needs assessments identify what training modalities are most accessible to the trainee audiences and most appropriate for the desired levels of skill-attainment; and how best to frame

collaborative projects and field placements for public health students.

Established relationships with practice partners (such as the Pennsylvania Department of Health, statewide professional associations such as the Pennsylvania Public Health Association and the Pennsylvania Association of Community Health Centers, local health departments and community-based human services providers) support ongoing promotion of training

opportunities to the target audience as well as individual and organizational level assessment of training needs, interests, and preferences. At the individual level, assessments are based on the Core Competencies for Public Health Practitioners developed by the Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice. These assessments inform the identification, development and delivery of training content as well as the workforce development plans of local health departments. Assessments conducted at the organizational level are informed by the Domains and Standards developed by the Public Health Accreditation Board.

The following methods developed through the past 14 years and now funded for the next four years include the following:

• Just-in-time advising from an advisory committee comprised of representatives from public health practice and other client organizations and agencies. Group meetings at regular intervals are expensive and time-consuming, so in the past we have kept them to a minimum. More efficient both in costs and return-of-information are frequent interactions with training stakeholders, which occur via telephone, email, and in-person meetings. • Key informant interviews via video-conference, email, or telephone with health

department senior staff. These are conducted on an approximately two- or three-year cycle depending on availability of funds.

• Surveys of individual public health workers on self-reported skills, experience, and confidence in job performance. These are conducted on a two- or three-year cycle, depending on availability of funds.

[*] 3.3.B. A list of the continuing education programs, other than certificate programs,

offered by the school, including number of participants served, for each of the last three years. Those programs offered in a distance-learning format should be identified.

The continuing education programs offered by the school’s two major training centers funded by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, as described above at the introduction to his criterion 3.3. The programs offered by these two centers over the past three reporting years are listed in Data Table 3.3.B.-PHTC and Data Table 3.3.B-AETC.

Public Health Training Center. Highlights of the PHTC include the receipt of a HRSA Model

Practice Award in 2012 for the workshop “Towards Religious Competency.” In 2013, the center’s Pittsburgh Summer Institute in Applied Public Health received a HRSA Promising Practice Award. Also of note is the workshop series on trauma informed care developed in response to the 2012 school-based shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. The series began with a 8 |

6-hour workshop introductory workshop that provides recommendations for the prevention and mitigation of traumatic events as well as the concept and practice of trauma informed care. Subsequently, four additional 3-hour workshops were developed at the request of training participants to explore the delivery of trauma informed care in greater depth.

AIDS/ETC.

Note: For programs of extramural funding for research see Template Table 3.1.1, and for service education grants see Template Table 3.2.2.

3.3.C. Description of certificate programs or other non-degree offerings of the school,