Center for Public Health Preparedness

The health of America's communities hinges on the expertise of the national public health workforce—an estimated 500,000 physicians, nurses, environmentalists, health educators, laboratorians, managers and others who work on the front lines of public health. Approximately four out of five currently employed public health workers lack formal training in public health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded the University of Washington through the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) to develop the Northwest Center for Public Health Preparedness as a national resource for frontline public health workers. This project is coordinated through the UW School of Public Health's Northwest Center for Public Health Practice.

The overall goal of the Northwest Center is to serve as a leader in providing curricula and other learning resources to state and local health professionals in the six-state region, (Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) for ongoing training in public health preparedness and injury prevention.

Our featured product from this collaboration is the Bioterrorist Attack on Food table-top exercise.

The Preparedness Center objectives are:

• Identify and evaluate the preparedness of the front-line public health workforce in each of the six states in the Northwest region
• Serve as a resource unit and provider of public health learning opportunities
• Develop and disseminate competency-based public health training to meet identified needs, and integrate with other technical skills into a comprehensive practice curriculum relevant to local and national priorities
• Conduct and organize instructional modalities to address high priority needs for the front-line workforce
• Foster the use of standards-based distance learning technologies to reach intended audiences
• Help to establish a public health research agenda to measure the effect of workforce development
• Collaborate on developing national evaluation tools to access program outcomes and the CPHP strategies
• Participate in developing a consensus framework for linking core competencies to public health certification and credentialing

CDC maintains information relevant to our efforts as one of their network of preparedness centers at Public Health Emergency Preparedness & Response.