One of the 10 Essential Services of Public Health is to assure a competent public health and personal health care workforce. Training is needed to provide that service. However, some public health workers have inadequate or minimal training budgets and limited time for outside learning as they deal with the urgent problems that crop up each day. The Northeast Public Health Workforce Training Project identified sources of information about learning resources that are easily and sometimes freely available to these workers. First, high-priority competencies and skills for training were assessed based on a framework of “universal” competencies for public health workers. Next, we attempted to find Internet-based resources to teach as many of these competencies as possible using a survey of public health training institutions. This was augmented with a search of the Internet using http://www.google.com. We identified resources for all of the high- priority competencies, including papers, slide presentations, and model web sites describing the policies of a given health department. The web sites included government, non-profit and academic sites. This presentation will provide a brief tour of the resources. This project led to the conclusion that the Internet provides a great deal of material for the self-motivated, independent learner; but these resources do not provide the interactivity that the less independent or less motivated learner would need. Nor can these resources take the place of agency wide training programs or traditional classroom educational experiences.
Learning Objectives: After attending this session the attendee will be able to access information on the Internet which is valuable for learning how to preform the 10 Essential Services of Public Health
Keywords: Distance Learning, Competency
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.