2014 Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals Now Available

The Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice (Council on Linkages) is pleased to announce the adoption and release of the 2014 Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals (Core Competencies). The result of a yearlong review and revision process, this latest version of the Core Competencies adds and expands concepts of increasing importance in a time of health reform and national health department accreditation, simplifies and clarifies the wording of competencies, and reorders competencies within domains to ensure a logical progression in the complexity of skills. The same eight domain and three tier structure present in the 2010 version is retained, and no competencies have been moved from one domain to another.

The Council on Linkages thanks the Core Competencies Workgroup and the hundreds of other public health professionals from across the country who contributed to this revision. More than 1,000 comments from the public health community guided the revision process to ensure the Core Competencies remain relevant to the reality of public health practice. Work related to the Core Competencies will continue as resources and tools to help with the transition to the new version are developed and updated. A crosswalk of the 2014 and 2010 Core Competencies, showing the relationships between specific competencies, and a revised set of competency assessments will be available by the end of July. There will also be several opportunities to learn more about the new Core Competencies, including at the upcoming annual meetings of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, National Association of Local Boards of Health, and American Public Health Association.

The 2014 version of the Core Competencies can be accessed online at phf.org/corecompetencies, and additional information about the Core Competencies can be found at phf.org/aboutcorecompetencies. Council on Linkages staff are available to answer questions as well. For assistance, please contact Kathleen Amos at kamos@phf.org.