The Alternative and Distance Education Consortium
for Analytic and Information Science Skills
in MCH Community

The Division Science, Education and Analysis (DSEA) of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) , Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has entered into cooperative agreements with three universities to improve analytical and information sciences skills in the Maternal and Child health (MCH) community.

The MCHB has developed three cooperative agreements as a part of a consortium project on alternative and distance education. The participating universities are the

• University of California, Berkeley,
• University of Illinois at Chicago, and
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

This consortium is part of the plan to bring together all of the Bureau's alternative and distance education projects into one organizational unit within the DSEA.

THE CHANGING NEEDS OF THE MCH/CSHCN COMMUNITY

Public health faces strong challenges and opportunities for addressing the changing needs of the public health system and its professionals. As noted in Taking Training Seriously: A Policy Statement on Public Health Training, "...over the past decade, public health has become an increasingly broad endeavor, fragmented by significant specialization within and among various levels of government. By every indication, these tendencies will become more common as health care reform compels the discipline to expand its population-based prevention strategies and assume new and challenging responsibilities to care for a more diverse society. The enormous size of the public health workforce, coupled with the increasing reliance on staff who are not formally trained in public health, demands new and intensified training efforts to encompass all who are involved in protecting and promoting the public's health."

During the past decade, analytic skills training for MCH/CSHCN professionals has been acknowledged as a critical component in moving toward fulfilling the core functions of public health. The form and content of the training have been and are evolving rapidly in response to the equally evolving needs of state and local health agencies.

As states reorganize the management of their MCH/CSHCN services, one of the major issues they face is the conflict between providing services to the population and maintaining a fiscally sound program. Exacerbating this problem is the critical need for training and retraining of MCH/CSHCN program staff. Many staff members in MCH and CSHCN programs have backgrounds in social and/or clinical services, while the demands of their job require greater data analytic tasks and have greater computer skills. The need for retraining staff is a heavy burden on the diminishing resources of the MCH/CSHCN programs and a cost-effective and workable training method for increasing the analytic skills of the staff must be found.

MEETING THE CHALLENGES

Alternative and education methodologies provide an effective and economical means for professional staff to enhance and advance their skills while continuing to meet their daily on-site responsibilities. The goal of the consortium project is to develop and implement creative utilization an application of alternative distance education opportunities to improve the delivery of health care services to mothers and children.

The MCHB Consortium proposes to address these concerns by using Internet-based technologies to develop cost-effective, broadly disseminated analytic skills training targeted to state and local MCH/CSHCN program staff.

These distance-training courses will improve the MCH community's ability to:

• Address core functions of public health (assessment, assurance, and policy development from a scientifically based perspective;
• Develop a systematic approach for incorporating data, directly or indirectly, into public health decision-making and priority-setting;
• Develop a systematic approach for incorporating data, directly or indirectly, into public health decision-making and priority-setting
• Develop logical and comprehensive data analysis plans
• Apply appropriate epidemiological, economic and statistical methods in addressing population and program-specific service, access, utilization, and effectiveness issues; and,
• Identify essential ingredients for the effective use of data to improve the health women, infants, children, and adolescents in their respective states.

THE ALTERNATIVE AND DISTANCE EDUCATION CONSORTIUM PARTICIPANTS

The University of Illinois at Chicago
Co-Project Director: Colleen Monahan, DC, MPH
Co-Project Director: Deborah Rosenberg, PhD
MCH Analytic Skills Online

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Maternal and Child Health Bureau Health Resources and Services Administration
Project Officer: Aaron Favors, PhD
afavors@hrsa.dhhs.gov

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Director, Principle Investigator: Julia A. Walsh, MD, DTPH,
Continuing Education and Development for Analytic Skills

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University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Project Director: Anita M. Farel, DrPH, MSW
EDUSIT: Enhancing Data Utilization Skills through Information Technology

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