On academics: perspectives on the future of academic public health practice.

Abstract

The Center for Public Health Practice at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health started in 1995, simultaneously with similar units at virtually every other Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) member school of the mid-1990s. It was a time when the academic public health community, motivated by the Institute of Medicine’s 1988 report,1 was attending seriously to the quality and dimensions of its relationships with the professionals, agencies, and organizations that made up the field of public health practice. Of the then 28 fully accredited schools of public health, all were conducting continuing education programs, student internships and practica, and faculty members’ consultation services to the field.2 However, at that same time, academic approaches to meeting the needs of research, teaching, and service for professional practice were not very deeply institutionalized. Institutional funding for practice activities was rare; and, most often, such activities were left to the discretion of individual faculty members.2 A high degree of variability in emphasis on professional practice existed among schools and among departments within schools. For example, well into the late 1990s, not all schools had been assessed for adherence to a new accreditation criterion requiring that students in the curricula of every master’s degree in public health (MPH) have a directed practice experience.3 By 2005, much had changed. By then, the ASPH Council of Practice Coordinators had advanced standards for academic public health practice (APHP), defining it as the applied, interdisciplinary pursuit of scholarship in the field of public health.4 The Council had also written about practice-based teaching5 and practice-based research.6 In 2005, deans of schools of public health recognized the centrality of practice to their schools’ missions by organizing a Practice Committee within the ASPH governing structure. Much of the early vision for practice-oriented scholarship had been realized, and it was time to pause and reflect. In October of 2005, the University of Pittsburgh’s On Academics Center for Public Health Practice (CPHP) celebrated its 10th anniversary by hosting a one-day symposium titled “Perspectives on Transforming the Field of Academic Public Health Practice.” The goals of the symposium were to: (1) reflect upon the history of academic public health practice; (2) identify the successes, experiences, considerations, and perspectives related to APHP; and (3) recommend ways of transforming it. The presenters were outstanding scholar-practitioners whose experience spanned national to local practice and whose affiliations included government as well as academia. This article is a synthesis of the themes and ideas that emerged throughout the symposium.