by Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS

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With the summer waning, children back in school, and fall on the horizon, I would like to take a moment to bring your attention to a few articles from the September/October issue of the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice that you might have missed. The first is “Building Professionalism Through Management Training: New England Public Health Training Center’s Low-Cost, High-Impact Model” by Kathleen MacVarish and colleagues. In this interesting article, the authors present an innovative training program provided by the New England Public Health Training Center designed to increase managerial skills in the era of Public Health 3.0. Their preliminary results suggest that this training is a feasible and acceptable way of delivering this important content to busy public health professionals.

Another article of interest is “A Measure of the Potential Impact of Hospital Community Health Activities on Population Health and Equity” by James Begun and associates. In it, Begun et al. present the results of their efforts to create a measure to assess the impact of community health activities that are delivered by hospitals on population health. Their findings suggest that hospitals are actively working to address social determinants of health, but that more investment in upstream causes of health and health inequity are necessary. I hope you’ll take a moment to read this thought-provoking and informative article.

Finally, I would like to draw your attention to an article by Jocelyn Herstein and co-authors entitled, “US State Public Health Departments Special Pathogen Planning.” In this compelling article, the authors present the results of a study to catalog state guidelines and perspectives of individuals working to control Ebola virus disease and other highly hazardous communicable diseases. An alarming conclusion of their work is that many health departments lack the funding, staff, and other resources necessary for the management of highly hazardous communicable diseases. I strongly encourage you to read the article and learn more about their timely and essential study.

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Justin B. Moore, PhD, MS, FACSM, is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice and an Associate Professor in the Department of Implementation Science of the Wake Forest School of Medicine at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, NC, USA. Follow him at Twitter and Instagram. [Full Bio]