Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Carl I Fertman.
Each of the certified health education specialist responsibilities and competencies for health educators has a leadership element. Health educators demonstrate leadership in a variety of roles with individuals, organizations, and programs. In this article, transformational and transactional leadership qualities are presented as reflection points on leadership for health educators.
The capacity mapping approach can be used to identify existing community resources. As part of this approach, inventories are used to provide information for a capacity map. The authors describe the development of two inventories and a capacity map for public health workforce development. For the first inventory, the authors contacted 754 institutions to determine available public health training resources; 191 institutions reported resources, including 126 directly providing distance learning technologies and courses or modules addressing important competency domains. Distance learning technologies included video conferencing facilities (61%) and satellite download facilities (50%). For the second inventory, the authors obtained information on 129 distance-accessible public health training modules. The workforce development capacity map produced from these two inventories revealed substantial resources available for use by individuals or agencies wishing to improve training in public health competencies.
Evaluating workforce development for public health is a high priority for federal funders, public health agencies, trainees, trainers, and academic researchers. But each of these stakeholders has a different set of interests. Thus, the evolving science of training evaluation in the public health sector is being pulled simultaneously in a number of different directions, each emphasizing different methods, indicators, data-collection instruments, and reporting priorities. We pilot-tested the evaluation of a 30-hour, competency-based training course in a large urban health department. The evaluation processes included strategic, baseline assessment of organizational capacity by the agency; demographic data on trainees as required by the funder; a pre- and posttraining inventory of beliefs and attitudes followed by a posttraining trainee satisfaction survey as required by the trainers and the agency; and a 9-month posttraining follow-up survey and discussion of learning usefulness and organizational impact as desired by the academic researchers and the trainers. Routinely requiring all of these processes in training programs would be overly burdensome, time-consuming, and expensive. This pilot experience offers some important practical lessons for training evaluations in the future.
OBJECTIVE: To examine the use of a school-based mental health program that works to prevent drug and alcohol problems and promote student mental health. METHODS: Students' presenting concerns, services used, service format and people to whom students were referred for services were investigated. Student use among schools was compared using chi-square analyses. RESULTS: The program was highly used, with a range of concerns differentiated by school type. Student concerns, service format, and student referral and follow-up varied significantly. CONCLUSION: Student use is a product of student need, school structure, and mental health educator.