Prioritizing environmental public health competencies for workforce development

Environmental health workforce development is essential for maintaining and enhancing the ability of environmental public health professionals to effectively meet local health and safety needs. In Canada, an extensive list of 133 competencies in eight categories was developed as part of a continuing professional competencies program to describe required knowledge, skills and values. These competencies can be used to inform workforce development policies and programs. Given the large number of competencies, it is not known which competencies are considered to be most important to current and future workforce development and therefore should be prioritized first for training and developmental opportunities.

The purpose of this study is to prioritize these competencies for the current and future environmental public health profession in order to inform the development of future responsive training and developmental opportunities. The study question is "Which competencies are considered to be the most and least important to the current and future (next 5 years) environmental public health profession in Ontario, Canada?" To our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind.

An electronic prioritization survey of environmental public health professionals in Ontario, Canada was conducted from October 2014 – January 2015. Descriptive statistics will be used to analyze respondent demographics. Hierarchical Bayesian analysis will be used to quantify the relative importance of each category and competency to the environmental public health profession. The results of this study will generate a prioritized list of competencies based on their relative importance, and potentially identify workforce segments that differ in their views of the importance of competencies.

By identifying the most important competencies to current environmental public health professionals, an evidence-based, tailored workforce development strategy can be developed that will enable environmental public health professionals to sustainably attain maximum effectiveness, both today and in the future.