Skills Enhancement for Public Health "Building a Solid Foundation for Public Health Practice"

What's New

Please note that registration for the Winter 2009 session will open on December 8, 2008. Register early!

New module

Another new module has been added to the Skills family! Starting in Winter 2008, "Biostatistics" will be available in English. The French versions of both Communicating Data Effectively and Biostatistics will be available during the Fall 2008 session.

Revised modules

Skills Enhancement has seen more than 1,000 successful completions of the three foundational epidemiology modules over the past 5 years. In 2006, we decided to do a full-scale review of the content and functionality of these "flagship" modules. We were assisted in this task by learner and facilitator feedback from a variety of venues: on-line comments in the bulletin board discussions, e-mails, facilitator meetings, and of course, the findings from our first Learner and Facilitator Forum in Quebec City.

We have worked with an e-learning specialist, programmers, designers and content experts to revise the content and functionality of these modules. We have updated graphics, changed some learning exercises, re-ordered content, added new content, made our questions more precise, corrected errors and repaired broken links. We are looking forward to showing you these improvements: a fresh new look, improved organization and flow, better functionality, and the best content that we can provide.

Australian Pilot

The recently completed Australian Skills Enhancement Pilot Project began at Latrobe University in Melbourne in 2002. Through the pilot program the first three Skills modules, Basic Epidemiological Concepts, Measurement of Health Status, and Descriptive Epidemiologic Methods were modified to reflect Australian content and were then offered to learners in Australia. In addition, the Australian and Canadian programs collaborated on the development of a new evidence-based planning module. Following the success of the pilot the modules have been incorporated as a credit course into the Health Sciences program at the University.

Name Change: Skills Enhancement for Public Health

As part of the newly formed Office of Public Health Practice at the Public Health Agency of Canada, we have officially changed our program's name from Skills Enhancement for Health Surveillance to "Skills Enhancement for Public Health", or "Skills Enhancement " for short. This new name reflects our new direction that will allow us to expand in the future to provide public health professionals with continuing education opportunities to enhance their knowledge and skills to support evidence-based public health practice, not only through e Learning, but through other methods of continuing education.