摘要：Public health program graduates need leadership skills to be effective in the complex, changing public health environment. We propose a new paradigm for schools of public health in which technical and leadership skills have equal priority as core competencies for graduate students. Leadership education should focus on the foundational skills necessary to effect change independent of formal authority, with activities offered at varying levels of intensity to engage different students. Leadership development initiatives should be practice based, process focused, interdisciplinary, diversity based, adaptive, experimental, innovative, and empowering, and they should encourage authenticity. Leadership training in graduate programs will help lay the groundwork for public health professionals to have an immediate impact in the workforce and to prioritize continuous leadership development throughout their careers. The 1988 Institute of Medicine report, The Future of Public Health, states, “Today the need for leaders is too great to leave their emergence to chance.” 1 (p6) This statement is still applicable today. Various leadership institutes 2–5 have responded to this call to build leadership skills among the public health workforce, with strong results. 6–8 However, the need for leaders in public health is still acute and growing, with increasing demands on public health professionals and an aging workforce. 9–11 The field of public health is also increasingly characterized by the need to work in interprofessional teams across disciplines. 12–14 This is especially important in the wake of the Affordable Care Act because of the increased emphasis on population health and prevention and the complex emerging solutions such as place-based health and health in all policies. Public health organizations must address these issues despite significant funding cuts and future uncertainty while simultaneously preparing to meet national standards for public health accreditation. Leadership skills are needed among the public health workforce to address these challenges and are explicitly and implicitly recognized in several sets of public health competencies, including those for public health professionals, 15,16 public health graduate education, 17,18 and accreditation of public health departments. 19 We propose a paradigm shift for public health education: technical skills in each area of practice are necessary but not sufficient to effectively influence population health. In addition to technical skills, students need to develop complementary leadership skills. The balance of technical and leadership skills will vary for any particular role, but in all cases a mix of both will be necessary. Therefore, education for public health graduate students needs to explicitly address leadership competencies as core competencies in addition to discipline-specific technical skills. (Although leadership preparation can also be beneficial for undergraduate students, our focus is on graduate-level educational programs.) Together, the development of technical skills and leadership competencies will enable individuals to deliver results at the task, organization, strategic, and policy levels. Although some schools of public health have started to establish leadership development programs, we challenge schools globally to develop and expand these programs for all students of public health.
