Education of the public health workforce and the Sustainable Development Goals: An analysis of existing competency sets

Objectives

This paper describes a project designed to quantify the extent to which existing competency frameworks used for educating the public health workforce contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly relevant to public health.

Study design

This was a qualitative study involving a content and thematic analysis and mapping of nine available public health competency sets against the World Federation of Public Health Association's Global Charter for the Public's Health and the SDGs.

Methods

First, the SDG targets directly relevant to public health were selected, then mapped against the elements of the Global Charter to illustrate their alignment with aspects of public health practice. Next, competencies from each respective framework were mapped against the SDG targets, and the results quantified as to the coverage of the SDG targets by each of the frameworks.

Results

Overall, very few competencies directly or fully covered the SDG targets in question, however, there were more competencies partially covering the targets. Except for one framework, many issues found in the SDG targets were not explicitly addressed by the competencies in most of the frameworks, namely, migration, human rights, violence, and food and water scarcity.

Conclusions

Overall, urgent action is required to ensure public health competency frameworks are more in line with the SDGs and include public health issues that disproportionally affect low- and middle-income countries.