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On Academics: Aligning a Departmental DrPH Program with the New ASPH Competencies

In 2007, the Association of Schools of Public Health (ASPH) Education Committee initiated a project to develop a model of core competencies to be used as a resource and guide for academicians interested in developing and improving doctor of public health (DrPH) programs and curricula at their institutions. The model includes a set of 54 competencies across seven domains that, ideally, all DrPH graduates should be able to perform. These domains include advocacy, communication, community and cultural orientation, critical analysis, leadership, management, and professionalism and ethics. The model highlights the importance of developing leadership skills among DrPH students to prepare them to assume senior-level public health research and practice positions.1 The centrality of the model’s concept of leadership emanates from the definition of the DrPH degree adopted by the ASPH Education Committee. The committee used the definition from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, “Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Health Professionals for the 21st Century:” “The basic public health degree is the master of public health (MPH), while the doctor of public health (DrPH) is offered for advanced training in public health leadership.”2 The ASPH Education Committee drew a distinction between the purpose of the DrPH degree vis-à-vis the doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree in public health education programs. Committee members noted that both of these doctoral degree programs “should prepare graduates for research careers, with PhD training typically aimed at graduates who focus their research in narrowly defined areas, while the DrPH is . . . an advanced professional degree designed to prepare individuals for public health evidenced-based leadership and practice-based research roles.”1 The Department of Behavioral & Community Health Sciences (BCHS) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) has had a departmentally based DrPH program for many years. In the past several years, there has also been an increasing demand for a PhD program. As a result of a change in BCHS leadership in 2007 and the development of a strategic plan for the department, work began in 2008 on restructuring the doctoral program. The restructuring involved simultaneously creating a PhD in the Social and Behavioral Sciences and making major modifications to the existing DrPH degree in keeping with the emerging ASPH competencies. Our two doctoral degrees focus on training individuals to be able to work in a complementary fashion along the prevention intervention continuum. PhD students focus on developing the skills to work in academic settings and design and test new, theory-driven social and behavioral interventions in randomized, controlled trials to determine their efficacy. DrPH students concentrate on learning how to translate, implement, and evaluate existing evidence-based programs into real-world, practice-based settings. The curricula for the two degrees are designed so that students in both programs take a common set of critical analysis courses in theory, methods, and statistics. This was done intentionally to facilitate a dialogue between those who will be leaders in practice-based research and those whose future jobs will entail the design and testing of prevention interventions in academic settings. Hopefully, this interaction will create a strong foundation for realworld collaboration between researchers and public health professionals, thus improving the processes of program development, translation and implementation, and evaluation. This article discusses the process of aligning our departmental DrPH program with the new ASPH competencies, the challenges encountered, and our expectations for professionals trained in our program.