NEPHTC is delighted to report that in 2023 Fiscal Year (July 1, 2022 – June 30, 2023)  it reported 63,515 participants across 609 courses. “After public health events in 2020-2022 created increased demand for online content, there was a perception of online training fatigue 2023,” says Karla Todd Barrett, Senior Program Manager and Training Specialist.  “Following a peak of 64,109 participants, use is about flat, which is terrific. Though participation is influenced by many factors, the number of offerings is an important consideration.  Last year we reached a high of 609 courses reported, with all partners contributing.”

“Together with strong partnerships and collaborations, NEPHTC is looking forward to continuing to provide a wide range of training opportunities across modalities,” says Patricia Janulewicz Lloyd, Principal Investigator. “We are expanding into more Environmental Health programming, and we are now situated in BUSPH’s Department of Environmental Health. We continue to place a strong emphasis on the unique needs of the medically underserved communities in each state in our region and how those needs impact the workforce.”

Insights from Partners

One NEPHTC email promoting an unexpected popular training received a higher-than-usual open rate. When NEPHTC marketed the recording of Anti-Fatness in Public Health, created by partner Yale School of Public Health Office of Practice on August 24, 2023, “it reached an open rate of 55.6% and a click rate of 26.8%, compared to normal open and click rates of 28-32% and 1-4%, respectively,” says Olivia Stenger, NEPHTC Marketing Manager.   This webinar reconsiders “obesity” and its “prevention” and asks how weight stigma and anti-fat bias intersect with public health practice. With a paradigm shift from “obesity prevention” to understanding weight stigma as a social and structural determinant, public health practitioners and researchers can avoid causing harm and push for better outcomes for their communities. “The Anti Fatness topic was raised as one of several important areas to increase workforce learning for supporting marginalized populations in Connecticut,” said Susan Nappi, Executive Director Office of Public Health Practice, Yale School of Public Health.

Other standard measures of training for FY23 in EHB data

Other insights from the EHB data are:

• Trainings were relatively well distributed across the public health competencies
• NEPHTC continued to grow the catalog of enduring trainings (recorded webinars and self-paced courses), with over 300 offered in FY23
• NEPHTC increased the number of trainings that have received the quality seal and had one more offered by the CDC Learning Connection

NEPHTC continues to adapt to the changing situations for our partners and the public health workforce,  and is looking forward to new content under development in FY24.