25 Days on the COVID-19 Hotline: Reflections on the development of core competencies from a Health System Impact Fellow

Abstract

When COVID-19 began to spread across Canada in 2020, local public health units and authorities began to implement emergency response teams. The purpose of this commentary is to describe my embedded learning experience at a public health unit during the first wave of COVID-19 in Canada. Using the enriched core competencies for health services and policy research doctoral graduates developed by the Canadian Health Services and Policy Research Alliance’s Report from the Working Group on Training, this article describes the development of core competencies of an embedded fellowship before and during the COVID-19 response. I describe the learning and shift in core competency development that resulted as I was deployed to the COVID-19 Hotline in Spring 2020.