Training Center Featured on CDC Educational Platform.
For the second time, a course offered by the New England Public Health Training Center (NEPHTC) is being featured on the Center for Disease Control’s Learning Connection.
The Learning Connection features quality public health learning opportunities from the CDC, other federal agencies, and federally funded partners. For the month of March, the Learning Connection is spotlighting NEPHTC’s Systems Thinking training program. The course, “Introduction to Systems Thinking,” is the online component of a three-part training program that consists of one live day of training for a large health department or a group of health departments, an online self-paced training module, and three months of follow-up coaching for teams who volunteer to work on a problem using a Systems Thinking approach.
The course will also be sent to more than 195,000 subscribers, primarily public health practitioners and healthcare workers, via the CDC monthly e-newsletter.
“The most exciting thing is that we have designed coaching into the training, so our evaluator and I are working on how to assess Systems Thinking coaching results so we can share the impact of this experiential learning approach,”said Karla Todd, the manager of NEPHTC, which is housed in the Activist Lab. “I really have to commend the Health Resources and Services Administration, which is requiring this training in our funding, for recognizing the importance of strategic skills.
“I’m particularly proud that we developed this first for our forward-thinking friends at the Vermont Department of Health, but since its launch last July, it has rolled out in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire,” Todd said. “Vermont is on its third round of Systems Thinking training, the Massachusetts Department of Health will be running our training later this month, and Maine will be running it in late spring.”
New England Public Health Center’s “Holding Effective Meetings” self-paced training was the first to be featured on the CDC’s learning platform during September 2018. This self-paced training, which was developed as part of the “Managing Effectively in Today’s Public Health Environment” blended training series, also received a quality seal in May from the Public Health Learning Navigator. Currently, NEPHTC’s Systems Thinking training is one of eleven NEPHTC trainings that have been granted a peer-reviewed quality seal from NNPHI’s Public Health Learning Navigator.