Webinar – Public Policy Competencies for Public Health

This webinar began to answer the question: What do public health actors need to know about public policy? We reported on the findings from a scoping review with analysis of the literature on competencies for healthy public policy. We explored the trends and tendencies over the past 15 years or so related to what public health schools, organizations, and authorities have done and are doing with regard to developing competency frameworks as one tool for increasing their ability to intervene in public policy. This webinar took place on February 2, 2022.

We described the seven main areas of competency found in the literature: policy analysis and development; influence and advocacy; partnership and collaboration; communication; policy context; social determinants of health and equity; and policy theory. In addition to this, we discussed leadership as a cross-cutting competency.

Participants came away from the webinar with a sense of the main competencies in public policy required by public health organizations and a sense of how this work might be institutionally anchored.

Speaker

Val Morrison
Val has been a scientific advisor at the NCCHPP since 2008. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in sociology from Concordia University and pursued PhD course work and comprehensive examinations in social stratification, cultural theory, and research methodology in the sociology department at Carleton University. Her projects at the Centre have mostly been in the area of Health Inequalities: intersectionality; policy approaches to reducing health inequalities; and wicked problems. Recently, she has contributed to the project Analyzing Public Policies, by looking into public policy competencies for public health, and to the Population Mental Health and Wellness project by working on wellbeing budgets.