University of California, Berkeley

Mission

Our vision is to have a fully staffed, equipped and trained public health workforce that effectively and efficiently detects, investigates, and responds to microbial threats. Our mission is to prepare public health agencies and staff to detect, investigate, and respond to microbial threats through education, training, evaluation, and research.

Our guiding principles express our values and guide our decisions:

  1. To promote collaborative learning;
  2. To make our trainings accessible and affordable;
  3. To prioritize work based on explicit public health criteria;
  4. To assess, promote and use evidence-based practices;
  5. To promote and use innovative, state-of-the-art methods and approaches;
  6. To collaborate with and involve stake holders, partners, and other agencies;
  7. To be a community resource by having open communication of methods, processes, and results.

Competencies


CIDER Core Competencies

CIDER is uniquely focused on infectious disease emergency readiness education and training. Among the public health workforce, our primary target audience is based on the composition of a typical field investigation team that would respond to an infectious disease emergency, including medical epidemiologists, public health nurses, epidemiologists, communicable disease investigators, environmental health investigators, and laboratorians (see Figure). A secondary target audience includes first detectors (clinicians, infection control professionals) and traditional first responders (paramedics, fire, police).

For this type of field team to be effective, members must have achieved three levels of competencies*: (1) core competencies in bioterrorism and emergency preparedness, (2) interdisciplinary competencies in infectious disease emergency readiness (such as infection control and worker safety), and (3) discipline-specific competencies in their areas of expertise (such as epidemiology or microbiology).

For our target audiences, we have concentrated our efforts on the interdisciplinary and discipline-specific competencies of primary focus areas. This has translated into offering basic, intermediate, and advanced education and training opportunities in these focus areas using existing competencies to guide and strengthen our curriculum development.

*To learn about public health competencies and how they are defined visit http://www.trainingfinder.org/competencies/

Updated: July 8, 2006; 4:21pm; TA