Walid El Ansari, M.D., D.T.M.&H., M.P.H., Ph.D.

Postgraduate Public Health Programme

School of Health and Social Care, Oxford Brookes University

Oxford, United Kingdom

There have been calls for a worldwide change in the education of health professions to ensure that the actions of graduates will contribute to the improved health status of populations. The new investments in workforce development are unprecedented (Potter, 2001), triggered by the increasing costs of care. This has prompted the training in the health professions generally and public health (PH) particularly to focus on improving efficiency and cutting costs, while maintaining gains in life expectancy and morbidity reduction. More and more evidence suggests that for the broader socio-health needs to be tackled, a more coherent community-based PH mind-set will be required (Ewles and Simnett, 1999; El Ansari and Phillips, 2001; El Ansari et al., 2004).

In the face of such sentiments, however, a wide range of health professionals are poorly equipped to think in terms of and deal with population-based health principles and philosophies. Thus, there is an increasing need for educational programs that can improve the breadth, awareness, and training of a wide variety of health professionals on PH concepts and thinking, as well as on epidemiologic approaches and methodologies. Different health problems will require PH responses mounted at various local, regional, state, or international levels (Veenema, 2001). This fact highlights the greater need for PH competencies within primary care (Colin-Thomè, 1999). Well-trained PH-oriented health professionals can form the basis of a strong national health care system. Hence, different groups, including clinicians, policy makers, academics, and educators, could promote the PH perspective, providing that they are better educated in epidemiology, health service evaluation, and health promotion (Dalziel, 2000). Consequently, incorporating public health threads and concepts into the health professions’ curricula offers a way forward (El Ansari et al., 2003a).

As illustrated in Figure A-1, the workforce necessary to accomplish the needed improvement in the population’s health must be supported with strong training programs that bring to attention a variety of health education and health promotion roles, while providing an increased understanding and awareness of the wider PH context in which health professionals practice (Latter and Westwood, 2001). In order to ensure a prompt and