The south central center for public health preparedness training system model: a comprehensive approach.

The South Central Center for Public Health Preparedness (SCCPHP) is a collaboration among the schools of public health at Tulane University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the state health departments in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The SCCPHP provides competency-based training via distant delivery methods to prepare public health workers to plan for and rapidly respond to public health threats and emergency events. This article presents the training system model used by the SCCPHP to assess, design, develop, implement, and evaluate training that is both competency driven and practice based.

High performance public health: assessing agencies' strategic management capabilities.

Limited knowledge about state health agencies' strategic management capabilities constrains their capacity to improve public health. The current study addresses this gap through two objectives: 1) To assess agencies' strategic management capabilities, conceptualized through a learning framework and 2) To portray both those capabilities and where the agencies have progressed along a developmental pathway of strategic management ability. Forty-one state health agencies' documents from 1995-2000 were content analyzed.