Educating the Public Health Workforce

resulting degeneration of its nuclear power facilities, leave little doubt that public health must be addressed at a global level. This then necessitates a world-wide workforce of well-trained public health professionals capable of working in concert across disciplines, customs, and languages. A welleducated public health workforce is one of the most notable challenges to achieving a healthy world. However, the World Health Organization, as well as many individual nations, project severe shortages in the public health workforce (4). The teaching of public health is more complicated than that of a single clinical discipline because public health is at once a discrete field and one that intersects with numerous others. Because public health is global and interdisciplinary, discussions about pedagogy must similarly engage representatives of multiple disciplines and geographic areas. The ultimate goal, of course, is to enhance the education of the current and future public health workforce to be effective in practicing public health around the globe. Trends in public health education enhance the significance of a world-wide discussion about pedagogy. The number of schools of public health has expanded markedly in recent years. India offers a dramatic example. Having had graduate training programs in public health through medical and health sciences schools for many years, India declared the need for distinct schools of public health. In 2006, India launched an initiative led by the Public Health Foundation of India to start five to seven new institutes of public health, as well as strengthen existing training programs and increase research capacity (5). In the United States (US), the number of accredited schools of public health expanded from 24 in 1988 to 50 by the end of 2012 (6, 7). Public health as an undergraduate major is burgeoning, from Australia to global on-line programs such Educating the public health workforce