The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #36692

Margaret Potter, JD, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Center for Public Health Practice, 3347 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, 412-383-2400, mapotter@pitt.edu and Gerald Barron, MPH, Allegheny County Health Department, 3333Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213.

The “10 essential services of public health,” as formulated by a national blue-ribbon panel in the early 1990s, have become the foundation for two major initiatives in public-health infrastructure development. Public health workforce development, particularly in the area of competency-based training, is using essential-service related competencies to assess training needs and to design training programs for employed workers. In the CDC’s National Public Health Performance Standards (NPHPS) Program, the essential services form the basis for evaluating agencies’ capacities and effectiveness. We used this shared foundation in essential service specification to link worker training and agency performance in an urban local health department. The premise for this work was that improvements in workers’ competencies achieved through targeted training should result in a measurable improvement in their agency’s essential-service based performance. We designed a framework to assess training needs, to identify the pre-training performance level of the agency as relevant to the topic of training, and to monitor changes in performance of essential services by individual trainees and the agency after training. Analysis of this framework by a committee of practitioners and academicians identified its strengths and weaknesses and yielded recommendations to facilitate the use of NPHPS in evaluating the effectiveness of worksite-based training. These recommendations will be presented in this session.

Learning Objectives: In this presentation, audience members will

• recognize the public health competencies related to essential services in training programs and in the National Public Health Performance Standards (NPHPS);
• review a framework for assessing and evaluating training effectiveness based on the NPHPS; and
• critique a set of recommendations for using this framework in evaluating the impact of a competency-based training program on the performance capacity of a local public health agency.

Keywords: Workforce, Evaluation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
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.