Improving the Efficiency and Effectiveness of Parent Education in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Background: March of Dimes partners with hospitals across the country to implement NICU Family Support (NFS) Core Curriculum, a program providing education to parents in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) across the country.

Purpose: This NFS project's goal was to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of NICU parent education by establishing consistency, improving quality, and identifying best practices.

Methods/search Strategy: A 5 topic curriculum was developed and implemented across NFS program sites.

Top Training Needs of the Governmental Public Health Workforce.

Context: Workforce development in governmental public health has historically focused on discipline-specific skills. However, as the field of public health has evolved, crosscutting skills have become critical. The 2017 fielding of the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) provides a national benchmark for gaps in crosscutting skills in state and local health departments.

Achieving Public Health Standards and Increasing Accreditation Readiness: Findings From the National Public Health Improvement Initiative.

Objectives: During 2010-2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implemented the National Public Health Improvement Initiative (NPHII) to assist 73 public health agencies in conducting activities to increase accreditation readiness, improve efficiency and effectiveness through quality improvement, and increase performance management capacity. A summative evaluation of NPHII was conducted to examine whether awardees met the initiative's objectives, including increasing readiness for accreditation.

Design: A nonexperimental, utilization-focused evaluation with a multistrand, sequential mixed-methods approach was conducted to monitor awardee accomplishments and activities.

Challenges and Innovations in Surveying the Governmental Public Health Workforce.

Surveying governmental public health practitioners is a critical means of collecting data about public health organizations, their staff, and their partners. A greater focus on evidence-based practices, practice-based systems research, and evaluation has resulted in practitioners consistently receiving requests to participate in myriad surveys. This can result in a substantial survey burden for practitioners and declining response rates for researchers.

Quality improvement coaching to build capacity within health departments: reflections and recommendations.

Context: Strengthening the Community of Practice for Public Health Improvement is a 2-year initiative that facilitates the exchange of best practices and builds capacity among the nation's health departments to become accredited and conduct quality improvement (QI). Launched as the Public Health Accreditation Board opened its doors to receive the first accreditation applications from health departments, the Community of Practice for Public Health Improvement is the next stage in the National Network of Public Health Institutes' efforts to nurture and expand a community of practice focused on accreditation and QI. A key component of the Community of Practice for Public Health Improvement is the QI Award Program, which provides small grants and distance-based QI coaching to state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments.

Advances in public health accreditation readiness and quality improvement: evaluation findings from the National Public Health Improvement Initiative.

Introduction: Continuous quality improvement is a central tenet of the Public Health Accreditation Board's (PHAB) national voluntary public health accreditation program. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the National Public Health Improvement Initiative (NPHII) in 2010 with the goal of advancing accreditation readiness, performance management, and quality improvement (QI).

Objective: Evaluate the extent to which NPHII awardees have achieved program goals.

Driving a public health culture of quality: how far down the highway have local health departments traveled?

Context: There has been an extensive investment in building public health organizational capacity to improve performance and prepare for accreditation. An evolving perspective has focused not only on the practice of quality improvement (QI) within the health department but also upon the extent the culture of QI is embraced within the agency.

Objective: No studies have examined the current national baseline of QI culture implementation, nor estimated the degree of QI sophistication local health departments (LHDs) have attained.