Kathleen Amos, MLIS, Assistant Director, Academic/Practice Linkages, Public Health Foundation
Does your work explore how laws can play a role in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury? Are you engaged in projects focused at the intersection of law and epidemiology? Your help is needed to ensure a set of competencies for legal epidemiology best meets the needs of the public health workforce!
This LECM aims to provide guidelines for minimum competencies in legal epidemiology, the scientific study of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury. CDC is in the process of refining the draft LECM and is seeking feedback from the broad public health community, including health officials, lawyers, epidemiologists, and policy experts in state, Tribal, local, and territorial health departments; faculty within academic public health and law programs; and leaders in national organizations supporting the public health workforce, to help guide this process. Whether you are engaged directly in legal epidemiology work, use the results of legal epidemiology studies in your own work, or work with those who do, your comments are critical to ensuring the competency model reflects the reality of public health practice and the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to be successful in legal epidemiology work.
We invite you to review the
draft LECM and share your thoughts on any aspect of the model, with reactions and suggestions related to any of the following questions especially appreciated:
- Do the competency statements contained in the draft LECM reflect the requirements for truly effective performance of legal epidemiology? Are there concepts that should be added or removed?
- Are the behavioral statements in the draft LECM representative of how legal epidemiologists demonstrate competency in their work?
- Does the draft LECM accurately reflect the knowledge, skills, and abilities that legal epidemiologists must demonstrate in your organization?
- How might you use the LECM in your work?
Interested in additional background about the field of legal epidemiology and the draft LECM or in hearing feedback received so far? This field and the draft model were explored in more detail during a virtual town hall meeting on
May 11, 2017. Watch the
meeting archive or view the
presentation slides to learn more.
Feedback on the draft LECM is being accepted through Friday, June 16, 2017 and will help CDC’s Public Health Law Program to refine the current draft and produce a final version of the model for release later in 2017. Please share your comments on the draft LECM in the Comments section below or by email to Janelle Nichols at
jnichols@phf.org. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Funding for this project was made possible by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ChangeLab Solutions under Cooperative Agreement Number 6NU8OT000141-04-02. The views expressed in written materials or publications do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does the mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.