Do academic competencies relate to 'real life' public health practice? A report from two exploratory workshops.

Public health (PH) organizations in different parts of the world (such as North America) have recently been seeking to define competencies relevant to PH practice. The Association of Schools of PH in the European Region (ASPHER) has initiated a programme to produce a European PH competency framework. ASPHER invited all member schools to participate in brainstorming workshops which yielded a provisional list of competencies. These were discussed and supplemented with more competencies at two European conferences (at Aarhus University, Denmark, in April 2008, and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes de Santé Publique (EHESP), Paris, France, in October 2008), with the participation of representatives of national health systems as well as of schools of PH (SsPH); the conferences aimed at further development of the lists based on continuing dialogue between SsPH and PH stakeholders. Typically, competencies are general descriptions of the knowledge or skills needed by an individual, or a group, to perform a specific activity in an organization. A European cross-country PH competency framework has many potential applications, including standard setting and curriculum development in PH education and training, benchmarking for completion of training and of specific roles, as well as an aid to job description construction. As well as promoting a structured and systematic approach to personal professional development, such a framework could be used to identify needs for PH capacity building, and to facilitate professional collaboration and mobility, exchange of ideas and PH employment opportunities throughout Europe. Moreover, the development process itself, aiming at agreedupon lists of competencies for PH education, will need to be based on discussion of real-life PH challenges and PH responses to these in the context of the existing PH system. Thus, specially designed workshops, at which vigorous discussion of these issues is encouraged, are needed to connect the workforce with those who employ it and with those who train it.