Future of Public Health Training: What Are the Challenges? What Might the Solutions Look Like?

Abstract

The Asia-Pacific region has rapidly changing health needs. This reshaping of health priorities is directly affecting current and future public health education. This brief review focuses on foundational public health skills including epidemiology, biostatistics, and health informatics. Epidemiological skills, in particular, are essential for policymakers and practitioners to identify the emergence of problems and to inform priority setting of public health efforts. Training needs to move beyond didactic, passive learning methods in class settings to approaches that engage and challenge students and academics in active, flexible learning and realistic problem-solving. We provide an overview of future trends in public health training in the Asia-Pacific region and illustrate the diversity of online training resources globally that can enrich staff and student skills and complement our active, class-based teaching.

Keywords: Asia-Pacific Consortium for Public Health; Epidemiology; active learning; public health; public health training.