Getting the Word out: Using Innovative Technology to Enhance Workforce Development

Background: In fulfilling its mission, Public Health Foundation (PHF) has successfully developed innovative services for communicating with multiple audiences. PHF reaches and offers training resources to the public health workforce through PHF-TRAIN and PHF’s Learning Resource Center (LRC). PHF-TRAIN, an electronic learning management system, ensures access to high quality education and enables the public health workforce to share valuable educational resources over an online platform. TRAIN also provides tools to manage and track learner participation and performance improvement while enabling resources and knowledge to be shared. For 20 years, LRC has provided educational and training materials to traditional and non-traditional audiences. These high quality materials provide information on topics such as immunizations, epidemiology, and performance improvement. LRC creates and executes multiplatform, integrated marketing campaigns for dissemination in the public health, healthcare and other sectors.  In these efforts, LRC connects to hundreds of thousands of professionals each year. PHF’s LRC and TRAIN support the immediate needs of states and national organizations to prepare the current  workforce to respond to vaccination efforts, flu outbreaks, and other events.

Setting: Various public health and health care settings

Population: Public health, healthcare, and related workforces

Project Description: 

• Demonstrate the role of TRAIN in expanding access to quality education
• Examine the importance of sharing training tools and resources across an online platform (learning management system) 
• Identify ways to communicate key messages to the public health workforce through TRAIN and LRC 
• Discuss proven marketing strategies to reach targeted audiences 

Results/Lessons Learned: Presenters will discuss how TRAIN provides access to over 19,000 public health trainings while allowing users to track learning and maintain personal educational records. In addition, LRC communicates relevant immunization and other programmatic information to a wide audience.  Presenters will also demonstrate how both TRAIN and LRC can be utilized to enhance the training of the public health workforce.