Objectives: Training of public health workers is an important part of preparedness. Self-assessment
is often used to measure how well workers are trained and whether they are ready to respond to an
emergency event. The current study assessed how well self-assessment predicts actual knowledge.
Methods: Public health workers at a Public Health Ready pilot site self-assessed their general level
of confidence, answered objective knowledge items about their local response plan, and self-assessed
whether they were correct on the objective knowledge items. Correlational analysis was used to assess
how well workers could assess what they knew and did not know.
Results: In the first analysis, for 15 objective knowledge items, the median correlation between
self-assessment and actual performance was 0.18. When the average self-assessment on the core competencies
was correlated with the number of correct answers to the objective knowledge items, the
correlation was 0.34.
Conclusions: The modest sizes of the correlations suggest that workers are weak judges of what
they know and do not know. To prepare public workers for emergency events, it is suggested that
two steps are important: (1) using the core competencies, develop a local response plan, and (2) develop
an objective knowledge test to assess workers’ knowledge of the local response plan.
