142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

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Evaluating Training in Public Health: What is going on?

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Wednesday, November 19, 2014 : 9:10 AM - 9:30 AM

Magaly Angeloni, DrPH, MBA , Office of the Director, Rhode Island Department of Health, Providence, RI
Michael Petros, DrPH , Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
Michael Fagen, PhD MPH , School of Public Health, Division of Community Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
Audio (mp3) recording Recorded Presentation (mp4)
Facing shrinking budgets and fewer resources, the public health community is in critical need to have the most skilled workforce to respond to the multiple challenges of the 21st century in the most effective way. But is the current workforce up to the challenge? Despite the trend towards additional training for public health workers, we still face real challenges to respond to the question if training is giving the impact we expect. This is the right time to evaluate training: public health accreditation requires a workforce development plan, public health practitioners come from multiple disciplines and see the need for training; tighter budgets make online learning the most viable option for training, and a public health learning management system (TRAIN, TrainingFinder Real-Time Affiliate Integrated Network) is used by at least 25 states. 

To study the current situation with respect to training evaluation, 7 TRAIN Affiliates based at state health departments participated in a mixed methods research study.  Through interviews, data and document analyses, the study uncovered the challenges, best practices and policies that favor an environment where training evaluation could thrive, as well as the most significant impediments to developing the public health workforce. This presentation will discuss:

-         The best practices, tools, and indicators health departments use for training and training evaluation

-         The universal barriers and trends that prevent public health from doing standardized evaluations and the role leadership can play to overcome them

-         The resources and features necessary for creating an effective training evaluation learning management system

Having a measurable training program is difficult even with unrestricted resources. By documenting the barriers and best practices to conduct training evaluation, this study informs public health leaders about the unmeasured results of the investments we made in training the public health workforce.

Learning Areas:

Administration, management, leadership
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Public health administration or related administration
Public health or related education

Learning Objectives:
Describe current practices, tools and policies to promote public health workforce development Identify the real and perceived impediments to conducting meaningful evaluation of public health training Describe the opportunities to enhance training evaluation using TRAIN as a learning management system

Keyword(s): Workforce Development, Training

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have conducted the literature review, and prepared other papers in the topic of workforce development. I conducted this work as part of the fulfillment of the Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree through the University of Illinois at Chicago. I also have working experience due to my current responsibility as the Performance Improvement and Accreditation Manager at a state health department, and prepared the Workforce Development Plan for my agency.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 5053.0: Workforce development, professional development, and human resources management in health administration - II