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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Janet L. Place, MPH, Steve A. Hicks, EdD, and Amy Trester, MEd. NC Institute for Public Health, UNC School of Public Health, CB# 8165, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-8165, 919-966-4756, steve_hicks@unc.edu

In 2005, the NC Institute for Public Health and NC AHEC received a grant from the Duke Endowment to develop an Academy Without Walls (the Academy). The Academy will develop organized sets of learning experiences, mostly virtual, for different public health professions in order to develop worker competence and certification along career ladders. The seven AHEC regional centers will provide the infrastructure for distributing experiences and resources to public health practitioners in the field. The resources and “roadmaps for professional development” will include a variety of learning formats and methods including multiple distance learning technologies to expand convenient access to educational opportunities. Learning experiences will be organized into “schools” for different public health disciplines. In response to the shortage of qualified candidates for local health director positions in the state, the Academy's first initiative is a “School for Health Directors”. During Phase I of this initiative, Academy staff are conducting in depth interviews with successful local health directors in North Carolina as a means of developing a list of key tasks and translating competencies into targets for learning and professional development experiences. This process will also help to identify the key components of health director success and how previous professional development experiences contributed to them being successful. This session will focus on the results of that assessment and identify the key components of an organized training and development process for health directors and future health directors.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe components of being a successful local health director
• Describe key learning needs of health directors and future local health directors
• Describe the components of a virtual public health academy.

Keywords: Workforce, Leadership

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No