The Institute of Medicine's report of 1988 said that public health agencies lacked the capacities needed to carry out their mission effectively. The new federal programs providing funding for public health training (HRSA) and preparedness (CDC) centers have their origins in that report. It spurred national leaders into consensus statements giving a clear definition of public health, along with its mission and essential services. The essential services became the framework used by our Pennsylvania & Ohio Public Health Training Center to itemize and assess workers' competencies needed to carry out the mission. They also became the basis for evaluating agencies' effectiveness in the CDC's National Public Health Performance Standards Program (NPHPSP). We explored whether essential-service based evaluations of training effectiveness were related to improvements in agency capacity. If training programs are designed to enhance essential-service based competencies among workers, then improvements in workers' competencies should be reflected in agencies' essential-service based performance. We are designing a training course addressing analytic, communication, and leadership competencies and delivering it to supervisory personnel in a local health agency. We will evaluate their agency's improvements in related performance capacity using the NPHPSP indicators; and we will evaluate workers' improvements in essential-service based job performance. Results and comparisons of these evaluations will be presented in this session. See www.cphp.pitt.edu/training
Learning Objectives: 1) recognize the essential-service competencies included in the training course and the related national performance standards; 2) compare the agency's self-evaluation on related essential-service performance standards before and after the training course with workers' supervisory evaluations of relevant job performance; and 3) critique this application of performance standards to the evaluation of training program effectiveness.
Keywords: Training, Workforce
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
Organization/institution whose products or services will be discussed: None
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.