Health Educators in State/Local Public Health Departments: Training Needs and Awareness of Emerging Areas of Public Health Practice.

Although great progress has been made to define the field of health education and provide a voluntary certification system for professionals, research about the governmental health educator and health education specialist workforce is limited. The 2017 PH WINS (Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey) provides valuable data on understanding the workforce demographics, attitudes, and training needs of governmental public health workers, including health educators, and informs future investments in workforce development efforts nationally. The purpose of this article is to examine demographics, job engagement and satisfaction, training needs, certification, and other characteristics of health educators and certified health education specialists (CHES) from PH WINS. We analyzed the data to describe the health educator workforce and compared it with the national governmental workforce across a range of variables. Compared with the national 2017 PH WINS sample, health educators were relatively younger, more ethnically diverse, more likely to be educated with an advanced degree, and were predominately employed in local versus state public health agencies. Health educators sampled were significantly more knowledgeable of all public health concepts compared with the national 2017 PH WINS respondent workforce. Comparison of CHES versus non-CHES professionals is also provided, along with practice and policy implications based on the data. This is the first detailed analyses of health educators in state and local health departments, with important findings and implications related to workforce composition, satisfaction, retention, and training. Further cross-sectional workforce research is needed to understand the current strengths and gaps in the health education workforce.

Rationale and Design of Distance-Based Training to Persuade Local Health Department Employees that Addressing Social Determinants of Health Is Their Job, Too.

Public health workers in local health departments frequently rate skills needed to address social determinants of health among their top training needs. These workers have the ability to impact social determinants of health, but many may believe this responsibility is not part of their job description or that they do not have the necessary skills or resources. Guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion and employing the case study method of instruction, the Region 2 Public Health Training Center designed a 45-minute, self-paced, online training module, titled Strategies to Advance Health Equity: How Health Departments Can Promote Living Wages, to persuade public health workers that addressing social determinants of health, especially those related to income disparities, is part of their day-to-day responsibilities. This article describes the module design, promising preliminary assessment data, and the formal evaluation plan.

Strategies and Tools for Public Health Workforce Training Needs Assessments in Diverse and Changing Population Health Contexts.

CONTEXT: A key component of the improvement of public health infrastructure in the United States revolves around public health workforce development and training. Workforce challenges faced by the public health system have long been recognized, but there are additional challenges facing any region-wide or cross-jurisdictional effort to accurately assess priority workforce training needs and develop training resources to address those needs. These challenges include structural variability of public health organizations; diverse population health contexts; capturing both topic-specific skill sets and foundational competencies among public health workers; and reaching/representing the target population despite suspicion, disinterest, and/or assessment "fatigue" among employees asked to participate in workforce development surveys. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to describe the challenges, strategies to meet those challenges, and lessons learned conducting public health workforce training needs assessments by academic and practice partners of the Region 2 Public Health Training Center (R2/PHTC). SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: The R2/PHTC is hosted by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and serves New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands within its jurisdiction. RESULTS: Strategies for responding to diverse organizational structures and population health contexts across the region; defining training priorities that address both foundational competencies for public health professionals and content-specific training to address local public health needs; reaching/representing target populations of public health workers; and analysis and report writing to encourage rapid response to identified needs and comprehensive workforce development planning are discussed. Lessons learned are likely instructive to other workforce training needs assessments in complex and ever-changing public health environments.