Overview

The Upper Midwest Public Health Training Center (UMPHTC) provides education and training on the latest public health techniques and practices for professionals and students in the public health field in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. These states share many similar characteristics including geographic size, population demographics, and medically underserved populations. They also share the challenges of aging and rural populations, health disparities, and designated shortage areas—all issues of public health concern of similar magnitude. In addition, the region’s ability to address these issues is complicated by the highly decentralized public health structure in each of the three states.

The UMPHTC serves the region through the identification of areas of need in public health workforce capacity, and through the development of curriculum and methodologies that will meet those needs, strengthening the competencies and capabilities of public health practitioners, students and faculty. Promoting partnership and collaboration, this training center maximizes the most efficient use of resources for public health workforce development.

The activities initiated by the UMPHTC during this past year reflect efforts to continue to strengthen an infrastructure to support a wide range of activities. This includes strengthening relationships with partners from state and local health departments, academic institutions and primary care associations through qualitative assessments of the public health workforce, and continued planning and implementation of training offerings to promote the competence of the public health workforce in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. In the past year, 5,046 practitioners participated in 55 different conferences, lectures or other specific training events, including distance learning courses.

UMPHTC is part of a network of 14 Public Health Training Centers (PHTC) funded by the Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA). These PHTCs are partnerships between accredited schools of public health, related academic institutions and public health agencies and organizations. More information on the PHTC network is available via the Association of Schools of Public Health website at: www.publichealthtrainingcenters.org