Nearly two years ago, deans and leadership from 47 schools of public health gathered in New York City at Columbia University to take stock of the varied approaches by which schools were innovating in education. With the world’s heath needs changing, and with the interventions and the science to accomplish them changing, it was a meeting whose time had come.
Gone are the days, if they ever really existed, where public health professionals could work in the siloes of their various disciplines. Today, we are encountering new health challenges, new delivery systems, and a proliferation of new organizational and reimbursement models—many in the United States spurred by the Affordable Care Act—that require integrated approaches and new methods that are more in alignment with 21st-century needs.
With all that we know about how to prevent disease, one thing is certain—public health cannot and does not work in a vacuum. We need to define the role of public health in creating population health and deliver the education to accomplish this. In collaboration with our colleagues from other health disciplines, we must lead health systems to focus on prevention and health across the life course and actively participate in redesigning those systems to promote prevention and evaluate impact.
This process can only succeed if schools of public health produce an educated workforce who have the knowledge, specialized skills, and leadership tools to imagine and implement the innovative programs and policies needed to enact change.
There have been several calls in the past few years for this reexamination of public health education. The Lancet Commission report (http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/education-of-health-professionals) identified the need for change in the education of health care professionals, citing the “fragmented, outdated, and static curricula that produce ill-equipped graduates.” The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health’s Framing the Future task force (http://www.aspph.org/educate) has delved deeply into what is needed for the future of public health education with reports and recommendations.
What is made clear by these reports and others, and our own experiences as educators and public health professionals, is that public health education must reflect today’s scientific knowledge about both preventing disease and preserving health. It must incorporate complex and integrative systems processes, rather than the historical inward-focusing silo approach.
As anyone who has entered into this arena knows, reenvisioning public health education is no easy feat. Public health educators need to articulate a new vision for their curriculum, find and devote the resources for the development of new content, address the needs of new constituencies, develop new pedagogical methods, and evaluate the impact of new educational approaches to have ongoing quality improvement.
Schools throughout the world have taken up this challenge. And as the collection of articles in this supplement demonstrates, there is no one-size-fits-all panacea. Innovation, as it should, has taken many forms in response to the needs of individual schools and their constituencies.
Today, we are at an exciting moment in history where reshaping public health education has the potential to dramatically impact and improve population health the world over. It’s a critical charge at a moment of change and is, appropriately, one that schools of public health are tackling. As educators, it is the ideal moment to learn from the unprecedented proliferation of experimentation that we are seeing in this field. This Supplement is meant to feed the conversation.