New York State Local Health Department Preparedness for and Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An In-Progress Review.

A mixed-methods approach was taken to describe lessons learned by local health department leaders during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York State and to document leaders' assessments of their departments' emergency preparedness capabilities and capacities. Leaders participating in a survey rated the effectiveness of their department's capabilities and capacities in administrative and public health preparedness, epidemiology, and communications on a scale from 1 to 5; those partaking in focus groups answered open-ended questions about the same 4 topics. Subjects rated intragovernmental activities most effective ( = 4.

Rationale and Design of Distance-Based Training to Persuade Local Health Department Employees that Addressing Social Determinants of Health Is Their Job, Too.

Public health workers in local health departments frequently rate skills needed to address social determinants of health among their top training needs. These workers have the ability to impact social determinants of health, but many may believe this responsibility is not part of their job description or that they do not have the necessary skills or resources. Guided by the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion and employing the case study method of instruction, the Region 2 Public Health Training Center designed a 45-minute, self-paced, online training module, titled Strategies to Advance Health Equity: How Health Departments Can Promote Living Wages, to persuade public health workers that addressing social determinants of health, especially those related to income disparities, is part of their day-to-day responsibilities.

A competency-based framework for training in advanced dental education: experience in a community-based dental partnership program.

While goals and objectives are useful to assess programmatic outcomes, they are not able to evaluate individual trainees' performance and/or corrective actions needed to improve performance. As a result, competency-based evaluation is increasingly being used to assess trainee performance at both the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. However, the translation of broadly stated competency statements into evaluable action statements continues to pose a challenge, especially in nontechnical domains such as the assessment and integration of cultural and sociodemographic variables in the development and execution of treatment plans.