Programs
Programmatic areas
Our training courses and activities are designed to meet the diverse learning needs of public health practitioners. We provide academic courses (full and half semester), a summer program consisting of numerous courses four hours to two weeks in length, regional conferences (one to three days), special events, and seminars. Our academic courses are free and scheduled on Tuesdays to facilitate long-distance commuters. Students desiring academic credit can enroll through UC Extension for a fee. Registered UC Berkeley students can also enroll in our courses for academic credit. Our classes are attended by a mixture of public health practitioners and registered students. In addition to offering interactive training courses, we are implementing a state-of-the-art webcasting system to deliver trainings live and on-demand.
- Core Infectious Disease Emergency Readiness (CIDER) Program
The CIDER program is the foundation of our comprehensive training programs. The overall goal of the CIDER program is to train participants to develop the basic knowledge, skills, and abilities in the following areas: key bioterrorism and other microbial threats; emergency operations planning and incident command system; field epidemiology; information and data management; microbiology; mass vaccination and mass post-exposure prophylaxis; contact tracing and investigation; infection control (including isolation and quarantine); risk and media communications; strategies for working with "hard to reach" populations; and public health law. The CIDER program consists of the CIDER overview course (1 semester), an intensive CIDER Summer Program, and regional conferences. The content areas that make up the CIDER curriculum will be taught in subsequent years, either as repeat courses and trainings to new participants or as updated, more advanced level offerings to repeat audiences. In subsequent years, CIDP will use the CIDER curriculum to develop online courses, educational tools, a certification program, and other products.
- Readiness Operations Planning and Exercises (ROPE) Program
Many health departments are at the stage of testing their BT preparedness plans with drills, tabletops, and functional or full-scale exercises. We meet the increasing requests for assistance in this area, CIDP is establishing a program to (1) assist health departments in developing emergency operations plans for microbial threats (Category A bioterrorism agents, SARS, pandemic influenza); (2) assist health departments in designing, conducting, and evaluating exercises to test their plans; and (3) teach courses in emergency operations planning and in exercise design, conduct, and evaluation. Our longer term goals are to promote and support continuous quality improvement with respect to preparedness. As preparedness indicators become available we can improve our ability to monitor improvement.
Click here for more details. - Epidemiology Preparedness and Informatics (EPI) Program
While disease control and prevention interventions are covered in the CIDER program, the Epidemiology Preparedness and Informatics (EPI) program will provide opportunities to educate and train public health staff at four levels: (1) basic understanding of surveillance and detection, field investigations, and the epidemiologic basis of control and prevention strategies; (2) in-depth understanding of basic concepts by practicing epidemiologists so that they can train others (train-the-trainer approach); (3) high proficiency in analytic methods to design, conduct, analyze, and interpret epidemiologic studies; and (4) high proficiency in the design, implementation, and maintenance of information management systems for complex investigations.
Click here for more details. - Public Health Readiness Research Training
Now, more than ever, we must prioritize and select our preparedness activities based on research evidence ("evidence-based public health"). If the evidence does not exist, health department analysts often gather data to guide local decisions and actions. Part of our mission is to help local health departments "ask and answer the right questions" in order to improve their readiness. In addition to our basic epidemiology courses, we will offer intermediate and advanced courses (decision analysis, effectiveness research methods, and infectious disease modeling).
- Public Health Readiness Workforce Development
In the fall 2003, UC Berkeley began offering a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Health. We seek to support and increase the number of public heatlh undergraduates who are familiar with the bioterrorism and public health emergency preparedness core competencies, and who desire to enter a public health emergency preparedness career after graduation. It is not enough to graduate students with a public health degree; they must also enter and stay in public health practice, and they must seriously consider public health emergency preparedness as a viable career option.
- Distance Learning
CIDP is partnering with the UC Davis Telemedicine Program, Center for Health and Technology (http://telemedicine.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/), and the UC Davis Emergency Services, Office of Research to bring CIDP courses to the public health workforce using state-of-the-art webcasting capabilities. For example, we will be able to offer computer-based trainings, such as Epi Info and Relational Database Management Systems, using live and on-demand webcasting. Our system will be able to stream not only video images and presentation slides, but also white board annotations and dynamic computer screen output, enabling us to demonstrate software applications. This system will enable us to deliver specialized technical trainings over long distances to the public health workforce.
- CDC Centers of Public Health Preparedness (CPHP) Network
The CPHP Network is a collaborative effort between the CDC-funded Centers that is coordinated by the Association of Schools of Public Health (more Network information available at http://www.asph.org/acphp/index.cfm). Approximately 20% of our activities and staff efforts contribute directly to the CPHP Network. CIDP is committed to being an active participant in this national Network, including contributing to the Network inventory; facilitating access to expertise and resources available to other CPHPs and partners; contributing to the development of discipline-specific competencies and the development of criteria to develop those competencies. CIDP staff participate in specific exemplar committees, regularly scheduled Network conference calls, and Network-wide meetings.
- Special projects or activities
Technical Assistance Projects CIDP provides technical assistance to local and state health departments to increase their capacity to detect, investigate, and respond to microbial threats, including bioterrorism. These projects have emerged from requests for help from local and state health departments and from our interest in developing expertise and capacity in specific areas (e.g., infectious disease emergency operations planning, exercise design and evaluation). Core BT curriculum for Communicable Disease Investigators Communicable Disease Investigators are public health professionals who are trained in epidemiologic disease case investigation and management. Sometimes called Disease Intervention Specialists (DIS), CDIs are a vital part of the public health workforce. They have been used for over 50 years for the follow-up of sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, vaccine preventable illnesses, and, more recently, anthrax. However, few education and training resources targeting this workforce are available to ensure that CDIs are well prepared to effectively respond to microbial threats. To close this gap we are developing a curriculum to train new and existing CDI staff in core bioterrorism preparedness. CIDP Professional Development The public health emergency preparedness field is rapidly changing. To succeed in our mission, CIDP must be a learning organization whose staff is able to address emerging public health issues and the training needs they engender. We achieve this primarily through collaborative learning: a process and approach based on the premise that we, as educators and trainers, have as much or more to learn from frontline public health practitioners as they have to learn from us. The challenge then is to harness this collective knowledge and experience and make it available through CIDP training and education efforts. We strive to earn trust from the public health community who sometimes view academically-based training centers as too far removed from the frontline action to adequately understand the rapidly emerging issues they face in public health practice, particularly in terrorism preparedness.