Defining the Foundations of and Parameters for Clinical Public Health

The evolving U.S. health care system is increasingly expanding the scope of practice for health care providers. Today's providers must be both excellent clinicians to their patients and physician leaders for their communities. In response to these changes, GW SMHS is integrating a curriculum in Clinical Public Health into our medical education program. Clinical Public Health, the application of principles of public health, population health, and leadership to medical care and health systems decision-making, provides tools that are required of health care providers who practice in 21st Century health care systems as they assume roles as clinicians, problem-solvers, community leaders, researchers, team members, and advocates.To guide continued GW SMHS Clinical Public Health curriculum development and to foster continuous quality improvement efforts, this project researched current models of medical/health education that incorporate public health/population health and the evolving scope of practice of clinicians through literature reviews, environmental scans, and interviews with experts.The literature review identified core competencies including bioethics, health disparities, inter-professionalism, social determinant, health law and policy, biostatistics and epidemiology. This range of topic begs the question how to teach each one to enough depth that future clinicians are equipped to practice them in a clinical setting. In addition, literature review highlighted models of medical/health curriculums incorporating public health principles. The environment scan involved researching various efforts and programs in existence using creative approaches to teach these core competencies, as well as identify experts behind these programs to interview. The interviews with experts in the field of clinical public health elucidated the practicality of implementing these programs, the challenges and limitations and resources required to move these models from the theoretical to reality.Applied and experiential learning was found to be the most favorable model for teaching students key clinical public health competencies. This project discusses the approaches, challenges and outcomes of program enriched with experiential learning. A major limitation was the trade of between breadth of knowledge and depth with the experiential learning approach. In addition, given the novelty of these programs, it was difficult to find a measure of their success at teaching competencies to future clinicians and the impact on communities involved.