Abstract
Academic research trends involving public health education may reflect a certain degree of talent construction status. This study systematically reviews the data for published literature on graduate public health education, aiming to provide evidence for the optimization of public health postgraduate training mechanisms in China. Keyword cooccurrence analysis was performed based on high-frequency keywords. From 1992 to 2008, the annual number of publications in this field was relatively low in China, averaging fewer than 5 articles. The number of publications showed a steep increase after 2009. The publications were mostly from single research institutions, including comprehensive universities and military medical universities, concentrated in Beijing and Shanghai. The high-frequency keywords were public health and preventive medicine, postgraduate training, professional degree, MPH, curriculum, and teaching reform. Hotspots consisted of practical teaching research, training, educational reform and comparative education research. Research on public health postgraduate education has not reached scale and has insufficient support. Moreover, many problems in graduate public health education still cannot be solved by existing studies: authentic and practical learning, a unified approach to cultivate graduate students, organizational change of graduate public health education, and international cooperation and public health education.
Highlights
According to the Chinese “Health and Family Planning Statistics Yearbook” (2018), over half (54%) of China’s public health professionals at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDCs) have graduated from a 3-year junior college, and approximately one-third of these professionals have earned a bachelor’s degree
Studies were limited to those focused on graduate public health education in China and excluded studies focused on education in other allied health fields
Interest in public health education has been growing over the past decades, with similar growth in the literature on graduate education in public health settings, which may correlate with practice-related policies at the national level
Summary
According to the Chinese “Health and Family Planning Statistics Yearbook” (2018), over half (54%) of China’s public health professionals at the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDCs) have graduated from a 3-year junior college, and approximately one-third of these professionals have earned a bachelor’s degree. Health professionals in China’s CDCs who have received graduate education account for merely 10% (Zhan, 2020). Most professional training in public health worldwide has been at the graduate level. Graduate education is the core of public health professional development (White, 2013). In February 2020, the Ministry of Education and the National Development and Reform Commission proposed postgraduate student enrollment expansion, which focused on clinical medicine and public health high-level applied talent. There is an urgent need to explore the cultivation of public health talent to respond to societal needs
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