National Consortium for Public Health Workforce Development
Public health associations and agencies have traditionally suffered from the “silo” effect; different sectors or groups receive distinct funding and develop individual approaches to improvement. This has been the case in public health workforce development as well. There is no unified source of funding for workforce development, so the workforce often lacks coordination and a unified focus for improving the foundational knowledge and cross-training needed to address an increasingly complex approach to population health improvement.
The de Beaumont Foundation brought together a group of public health leaders from national partners, agencies, and associations to serve on a National Consortium for Public Health Workforce Development. Drawing on the work of de Beaumont’s and ASTHO’s PH WINS project and previous work, the consortium conducted an asset analysis of issues that public health workers had identified as priorities — systems thinking, change management, persuasive communications, informatics and analytics, problem-solving, and working with diverse populations. The consortium explored approaches to expand access to, and reduce redundancy in, existing curricula and training. They focused on developing partnerships with healthcare and private sector organizations to find common interests in trainings for transferable skills. Finally, the consortium developed recommendations for a national model to simplify learning pathways and define a best practices approach to public health workforce development. Read the report.