Scaling Up and Tailoring the “Putting Public Health in Action” Training Curriculum

Abstract

Despite access to a growing menu of evidence-based interventions, public health practitioners continue to underuse them, in part because practitioners may require new knowledge, skills, and resources to do so. Numerous foundations, universities, governmental agencies, and consultants are providing trainings to address the gaps in practitioners’ capacity. To most significantly affect population health, these trainings need to reach practitioners who may have limited access to on-site trainings. Despite the number of organizations offering trainings, little is known about how to scale up trainings to efficiently extend their reach or how to tailor trainings to the needs of different intervention. The Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network and its collaborating centers have developed a training curriculum and delivered it in both in-person and distance formats to a range of audiences. The purpose of this article is to describe the training curriculum and findings from the Network’s evaluation of approaches used to scale up delivery of the “Putting Public Health Evidence in Action” curriculum and tailor content for specific evidence-based interventions.