Ensuring a competent public health responder workforce: The CDC experience

Training needs assessment tools for the public health workforce at an institutional and individual level: a review

BACKGROUND

The public health workforce (PHW) needs to have the necessary capacities to provide healthcare services and public health services. Training needs assessments (TNA) is necessary to assess and understand PHW and their capacities to provide services. This review attempts to identify and describe published studies on tools and methodologies for TNA of the workforce used in public health and health-related fields.

METHODS

A systematized review of literature was carried out in February 2022. Cochrane Handbook for systematic review version 5.2.0 and PRISMA 2020 statement were used to guide reporting. This review includes original research, reports and grey literature from the websites of public health organizations in English.

RESULTS

This review included 38 documents for evidence synthesis. Twenty-seven documents were indexed literature (71%) and 11 were grey documents (29%). TNA documents were published between 1999 and 2022. TNA was performed in many countries around the world. The organizations used either a validated questionnaire or created their own tools to perform organizational and individual self-assessments. The TNA tools were developed using different methods such as expert panels, literature reviews, stakeholder interviews and quantitative surveys.

CONCLUSION

TNA is useful for defining and characterizing the public health workforce in every organization. Workforces consist of individuals who have their own training needs to fulfill their tasks. Therefore, individual and organizational TNA should be combined to study the public health workforce and their capacities.

Applying the Ready, Willing, and Able Framework to Assess Agency Public Health Emergency Preparedness: The CDC Perspective

Public health emergencies in the United States have been complex, frequent, and increasingly costly in the past decade, at times overwhelming government agencies that are primarily resourced for routine, nonemergency health functions. Emergencies are not always predictable, and adequate resources are not always available to prepare staff in advance for emergency response roles and to mobilize them quickly when a new threat emerges. Additionally, real-world data that connect preparedness levels to response outcomes may be difficult to obtain, further limiting continuous quality improvement efforts by public health officials. In this article, we apply the Ready, Willing, and Able (RWA) framework to identify areas for improvement related to organizational and staff readiness, willingness, and ability to respond during a public health emergency. We share emergency response deployment, training, and personnel data collected as part of emergency response activations (2008 to 2018) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to illustrate how the framework may be applied at government agencies to improve response processes and effectiveness. Additionally, we propose potential metrics aligned with the framework constructs that may help emergency managers consistently assess agency preparedness and, over time, be incorporated into broader standardized measurement methods. We conclude that the RWA framework is a practical tool that can complement other preparedness approaches currently in use at government public health agencies.