Public health scholarship program - the purpose of the lighthouse project scholarship program is to provide financial support in the form of tuition scholarships to individuals pursuing graduate…

Public health scholarship program - the purpose of the lighthouse project scholarship program is to provide financial support in the form of tuition scholarships to individuals pursuing graduate training in public health. The focus of the training will be to increase knowledge and skills required to respond to covid-19, other public health emergencies and lead efforts toward resilience and recovery from such events. Need: this newly trained public health workforce will be employed in the communities of greatest need and will be racially/ethnically similar to the communities they serve. Aligning training with community and health department needs in detroit and michigan can better fortify public health response. The lpsp will achieve the following 4 broad objectives: 1) enhance the knowledge and skills of the public health workforce by enhancing community partnerships and promoting linkages to identify employment needs; 2) ensure our current wayne state university (WSU) master of public health (MPH) program training program aligns with public health workforce needs; 3) educate the workforce to address public health disparities and integrate principles of social determinants of health into public health practice; and 4) provide specific hands-on training in responding to covid-19 and other public health emerging issues. To meet our objectives, we will leverage and diversify our current community partnerships by offering MPH program tuition-based scholarships for URM and disadvantaged public health workforce employees, health professional students and undergraduates. Together, these students will bring their own backgrounds and training experiences to interprofessional collaborations that will provide the mainstay for the future of the metropolitan detroit public health community. The total number of projected scholarships for the entire funding period = 30. Methodology: the lpsp team includes a combination of public health training program faculty, education specialis TS, public health departments and community-based organizations who will collaborate to train graduate public health students to respond to public health emergencies. This project will have active involvement from detroit-based public health experts who will provide direct training and skill development to the students. Classroom training in a culturally responsive environment and hands-on field experience in responding and recovering to public health emerging threats is designed to bolster the ability of the graduates to procure employment in public health sectors. A variety of skills acquisition combined with focused career development is intended to increase and diversify the public health workforce. Evaluation: our comprehensive evaluation plan is based on the HEALTHYPEOPLE2020 map-IT processes. Careful data tracking of competency and student skills attainment will be ongoing. Adapting quickly to changes in public health workforce needs will lead to changes in training. Surveys for all recruitment, retention and graduation of the scholarship recipients will inform best practices and enhance sustainability of program efforts. Measures of student, faculty and community organization training performance will also be captured. Long-term follow-up strategies to assess alumni job performance and skills application will also be conducted. By successfully implementing this funded project we will have graduated 30 URM or disadvantaged MPH program students, who will have the knowledge and skills to respond to any public health emerging threat and they will obtain employment to increase the public health workforce serving detroit and the surrounding communities. Funding preference: we are applying for a funding preference based on our performance in the two following areas: (1) serving individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds and (2) large proportions of individuals who serve in underserved communities.