Public Health Education Reform in Context

Abstract

In a time of limited resources and public indifference, much needs to be done to modernize and maintain the profession of public health. Public health education must incorporate new knowledge and new strategies that will be needed to protect the public’s health, as well as adapt and expand to meet new challenges and demands. The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM’s) Report Who Will Keep the Public Healthy is a timely and important contribution to the debate about the future of public health that identifies areas of new or expanding knowledge to which public health practitioners must have access. 1 The report points out the need for a central organizing construct for public health education and to improve opportunities for practice-based learning. The ecological model promoted by the report is ar obust and comprehensive model. The report fails, however, to clarify the authors’ conceptual approach to education or to address the tensions inherent in the multiple perspectives and methodologies of the new core content areas it recommends. Although the executive summary notes in passing that, “Radical change is called for,” the authors miss an opportunity to fully explain or justify this call. We agree that fundamental, and perhaps even radical, change is necessary. In our view, however, three fundamental issues for public health education are raised but not addressed in the IOM report. First, the report calls for significant expanded content in public health education without giving attention to the already problematic balance between breadth and depth. Second, the report highlights new challenges and proposed solutions without discussing current and historic deficiencies in the public health infrastructure and educational system. Such deficiencies have been well documented in other IOM reports and elsewhere, 2‐4 but the