Karla Todd, Senior Program Manager Training Specialist for New England Public Health Training Center, led a session at the NACCHO Annual Conference in Orlando.  This year’s conference emphasized the theme, Improving the Nation’s Health through Public and Private Partnerships.  Todd’s session, co-authored with Hope Kenefick, NEPHTC Evaluator, and Julia Ross, Systems Thinking Expert from Ross and Company, LLC, emphasized the importance of coaching as a mechanism to get more impact for public health.

The session entitled, “Systems Thinking Skills Cannot Be Built in a Day: Coaching to Build Cross-Cutting Skills for Public Health”, took place on July 10, 2019.   Slides can be found here.

Todd emphasized that partnerships with health departments and associations were allowing NEPHTC to roll out systems thinking training in multiple modalities, and that NEPHTC was making it easy to do in live training, complimentary online training  and that the coaching feature encouraged teams to tackle the challenge of taking elegant concepts through planning phases, and sometimes setting up for implementation.

“It’s great to get positive reviews for training and to assess knowledge gain, but the real reason organizations and participants are engaging is because they want to see a change in the dynamics of their organizations and populations of concern.  That’s what coaching can start,” says Todd.

The Public Health Learning Network’s publication Elevate recently featured Systems Thinking expert Julia Ross.  See her description of Systems Thinking for public health teams as they improve their capacity for Systems Thinking via training and coaching.