BUSPH Practice Office Receives Two Major Federal Training Awards.
The Office of Public Health Practice at the Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) was awarded two grants from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) that will help promote public health workforce development by providing excellent training opportunities for BUSPH students, governmental public health workers, and community health workers.
One award (3-year grant of $150,000/year) will support the PRECEPT (Practical Experience for Careers through Epidemiology Training) Program. Designed to help address the shortage of well-trained, diverse epidemiologists at state and local health departments in Massachusetts, PRECEPT will provide $5,000 traineeships to 72 BUSPH students over the next three years. These students, primarily epidemiology concentrators, will conduct an intensive practicum that is even more robust than the current school-wide practicum. PRECEPT trainees will conduct their practicum for a minimum of 320 hours and will participate in Career Service’s Career PREP program and other training seminars and events.
PRECEPT will serve as an incentive to recruit students of diverse backgrounds into the MPH Epidemiology concentration and to encourage their training in a severe workforce shortage area. It will not only benefit students who will garner excellent paid experiences, but it will also help forge stronger partnerships between the School’s faculty and state and local public health agency practitioners.
The other HRSA award (4-year grant of approximately $850,000/year) funds the New England Public Health Training Center (NEPHTC), which is administratively housed at BUSPH and encompasses all six states in the region and numerous Schools and Programs of Public Health, including Dartmouth, Yale, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of New England, Brown, and University of Vermont.
The NEPHTC is one of 10 regional centers and one national coordinating center selected and funded by HRSA to address training needs of public health practitioners nationwide. Across the New England region, the fragmented nature of local public health creates barriers to delivering high quality public health services. In addition, the opportunities and challenges created by the Affordable Care Act will require stronger knowledge and skills, and an ability to adapt to a rapidly changing health care and public health environment.
The NEPHTC seeks to strengthen the technical, scientific, managerial, and leadership competencies of the current and future public health workforce in New England. The NEPHTC will build on and enhance work done over the previous 14 years by BUSPH and its academic and community partners, as the HRSA-funded New England Alliance for Public Health Workforce Development. The NEPHTC will focus on developing and implementing high-quality distance-based learning opportunities, faculty student collaborative projects, and field placements to strengthen the competencies of the current and future public health workforce in New England. The long-term goal of the NEPHTC network is to ensure that the region has the capacity to deliver high quality essential public health services.