Using the People and Places Framework to Educate a New Generation of Prevention and Community Health Professionals

A range of public health professionals are involved in the practice of prevention and community health (PCH). To effectively promote and maintain the health, safety, and development of individuals and communities, PCH practitioners must accomplish two fundamental tasks: identifying the most important determinants of health in the communities in which they operate, and mobilizing diverse resources to mitigate the most important negative determinants and/or cultivate the most important positive determinants of health. We are developing an integrated approach to training the full range of masters-level PCH professionals in the skills necessary to accomplish these tasks. The approach is based on the recently developed People & Places Framework (Maibach, Abroms, Marosits, 2007) which offers us, and our students, many advantages. First, the framework provides a practice-oriented systematic representation of how the people- and place-based elements of an ecological model operate and interact to influence population health. As such, it helps identify the most important targets of PCH intervention. Second, it provides a means of integrating the contributions of diverse PCH professionals into a coherent approach to community-based intervention. And lastly, because the framework provides a straightforward representation of the factors that influence community health, we believe it enhances our ability to effectively engage other stakeholders – both inside and outside the health community – in contributing to PCH goals. This presentation will specifically describe how the People & Places framework is currently being used to train MPH-level students in health promotion, health communication & marketing, community-oriented primary care, and maternal and child health.