State of professional education and training in social marketing

Background: Healthy People 2020 (HP-2020)objectives call for increasing the proportion of public health and accredited master of public health programs that offer courses and professional development opportunities in social marketing. In this study, we assessed the existing social marketing, health and risk communication curricula offered at these schools in order to establish baseline data that will be used to evaluate the degree to which these objectives are met by the year 2020.

Methods: A brief online survey was developed to document course offerings in the social marketing, health and risk communication for the 2011-2012 academic year. Student enrollment and number of years a course had been offered were requested. The number of offerings and estimated number of participants for workforce development in these content areas were also collected.

Results: Data was obtained from twenty schools of public health, a response rate of 40%. Overall, 75% of the responding schools offered course in health communication and 20% offered either social marketing or risk communication courses. Specifically to social marketing, only four of the responding schools offered graduate level courses; professional development opportunities were even more limited.

Conclusions: In the academic year 2011-2012, as few as 2.5% of all enrolled public health students were exposed to any of these content areas. Our findings show that the national objectives to increase course offerings and professional development opportunities in social marketing have much room for improvement. Plans should be developed to identify the necessary actions to achieve the stated HP-2020 objectives.