Biomedical subjects

Margaret A Potter

Publications and source records attributed to Margaret A Potter.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Connecting silos: the legal bases for public health emergency response in Pennsylvania.

Emergency response in the United States rests on legal authorities deriving from separate levels, branches, and departments of government, and they originate with different goals and priorities from law enforcement, the judiciary, public health, agriculture, environmental protection, and other areas of expertise. Nevertheless, effective responses require clarity and coordination. The question is whether existing laws and policies leave "disconnects" or gaps that are likely to require decision making and action but that are untested in actual experience and uncertain in law. Through the phased process described here, the authors explored such possible disconnects as identified by Pennsylvania officials and professionals. First, individuals with official operational authority described through in-person interviews how each would respond to a fictional disease-outbreak scenario. Next, these officials met together to compare individual responses and to discuss their concerns. Finally, their observations were analyzed and listed as legal and policy disconnects in four areas: governmental powers, civil liberties, information sharing among agencies, and information dissemination to the public. These results will guide future meetings among local, state, and federal officials in Pennsylvania for the purpose of revising and updating laws and policies to improve the state's capacity for effective and well-coordinated emergency response.

Bioterrorism↗

PubMed2005

The public health infrastructure and our nation's health.

Threats to Americans' health-including chronic disease, emerging infectious disease, and bioterrorism-are present and growing, and the public health system is responsible for addressing these challenges. Public health systems in the United States are built on an infrastructure of workforce, information systems, and organizational capacity; in each of these areas, however, serious deficits have been well documented. Here we draw on two 2003 Institute of Medicine reports and present evidence for current threats and the weakness of our public health infrastructure. We describe major initiatives to systematically assess, invest in, rebuild, and evaluate workforce competency, information systems, and organizational capacity through public policy making, practical initiatives, and practice-oriented research. These initiatives are based on applied science and a shared federal-state approach to public accountability. We conclude that a newly strengthened public health infrastructure must be sustained in the future through a balancing of the values inherent in the federal system.

Accreditation↗

PubMed2005

Cross-sector leadership development for preparedness.

After fall 2001, scientists and professionals recognized the importance of integrating public health with traditional first-response professions in planning and training for disasters. However, operationalizing this approach among professionals in the field confronted barriers that were both inter-cultural and jurisdictional. The Pennsylvania Preparedness Leadership Institute (PPLI) is a collaboration of the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Public Health Preparedness. Team members are recruited from public health, emergency medicine, emergency management, hospitals, and public safety agencies from each of nine multi-county regions in Pennsylvania. Each team takes on a year-long project that addresses a strategic problem as a focus for capacity-building within its region. Unexpectedly during PPLI's first year in operation, a hepatitis-A outbreak tested whether one regional team could successfully mount the necessary integrated response. This experience, as well as the planned evaluation for PPLI, demonstrated both the successful processes and the positive impact of this integrated leadership training initiative.

Curriculum↗

PubMedDate not supplied

A capacity mapping approach to public health training resources.

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.

Competency-Based Education↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Supporting academic public health practice: a survey of organizational structures in public health schools.

A survey was conducted at 28 schools of public health to assess how they allocate responsibility for three kinds of academic practice activity: continuing education, student internships, and technical consultation by faculty. Respondents identified whether these responsibilities were in a central practice unit, in another schoolwide unit, dispersed among several units, or dispersed among individual faculty members. Though all respondents engaged in these activities, responsibility tended to be carried out by individual departments or independent faculty members. This typically decentralized approach raises questions about the sustainability of academic public health practice that call for further inquiry.

Data Collection↗

PubMedDate not supplied

A model for public health workforce development using the National Public Health Performance Standards Program.

Workforce development programs in public health should link improvements in workers' performance with improvements in their agencies' performance. The "ten essential services" of public health provide criteria for measuring both individual worker training (as in workforce competency standards) and agency performance (as in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Public Health Performance Standards Program). This shared foundation was the basis for a model strategic training program developed for use in a 500-employee urban county health department. Full implementation of this model as a foundation for assessment, curriculum development, and evaluation requires careful attention to management issues, confidentiality of employee records, and evaluation methodologies.

Efficiency, Organizational↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Evaluating workforce development: perspectives, processes, and lessons learned.

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.

Adult↗