Sarah Lee, School of Dentistry
Public health and community-based practitioners increasingly are being asked to adopt, adapt, and implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs) to improve population health. Despite access to a growing menu of EBIs, practitioners underuse them, because EBI adoption and implementation require knowledge, skills, and resources that they may not currently have.
Numerous foundations, universities, governmental agencies, and consultants provide trainings to address the gaps in practitioners’ capacity. Many trainings address similar objectives related to assessment, goal setting, and how to find, adapt, implement, and evaluate EBIs. Despite the number of organizations offering trainings, little is known about how to scale-up trainings related to EBIs to efficiently extend their reach to those with limited access. The national Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network, part of the Prevention Research Centers, developed a training curriculum on evidence-based public health practice, “Putting Public Health Evidence in Action”. A training collaborative in North Carolina and Oregon delivered it in both in-person, distance, and blended formats to local public health and community-based practitioners. This session will detail the specific approaches used to extend the reach of this curriculum using distance learning modalities and share quantitative and qualitative evaluation findings from surveys of 252 participants in eight trainings conducted in North Carolina and Oregon. Overall, comments about the training were positive and evaluation findings suggest that face-to-face is an important delivery method for fostering interaction with peers and instructors. Recommendations will be provided for using multi-modality approaches to efficiently extend a training’s reach while also increasing participants’ competency and practice.