LEARNING OBJECTIVES AND LEARNER OUTCOMES
Basic Community Public Health Practice Certificate

Through this certificate program learners will acquire basic knowledge, attitudes and skills that are important for public health practice and will be able to:

1. Describe public health as a system, including its unique and important features and their role within it, to general audiences
2. Apply measures of population health and illness, including risk factors, to community health improvement initiatives
3. Identify and distinguish public health and prevention strategies from curative strategies for prevalent health problems
4. Describe the role of law and government in promoting and protecting the health of the public and identify specific functions and roles of governmental public health agencies in assuring population health
5. Identify and explain how various organizations, positions and roles contribute to carrying out public health's core functions and essential services, and assess the components of the public health infrastructure
6. Apply principles derived from the basic public health sciences to planning, implementing and evaluating public health interventions
7. Describe public health roles in emergency and disaster preparedness and response activities
8. Describe the major contributions of the social sciences (e.g. anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, economics) to the field of public health
9. Explain major theoretical models derived from the social sciences to understand health problems and develop interventions
10. Demonstrate applications of knowledge from the social sciences to address public health problems
11. Compare and contrast diverse methodological approaches derived from different social sciences to address public health problems
12. Describe how social science-based knowledge and tools combine with biological and physical science to understand and address public health problems
13. Explain strategies to effectively work in a cross-cultural context and with different ethnic groups
14. Describe ethical aspects of public health research and practice as informed by the social sciences
15. Select indicators for assessment based on health promotion/assessment models
16. Engage with communities of interest, facilitating participation and capacity building, while identifying ethical and power status issues
17. Identify strategies for data acquisition and understand the corresponding assumptions regarding knowledge development
18. In public health needs assessment, design approaches taking into account community and cultural health definitions, culturally-based health behaviors, and cultural communication styles in planning and implementing effective programs and evaluations
19. Involve communities in assessing need for health programs, selecting health program approaches, and planning health programs
20. Communicate effectively both in writing and orally, including report and proposal preparation, and in interactions with the media to communicate public health information
21. Describe the historical development of epidemiology as a field of study
22. Compute measures of disease occurrence and association in populations
23. Identify and assess criteria for causal inference
24. Recognize components of various study designs, and the impact of bias on study findings