Public health training is widely available, but little of it is built for rural practice.

Rural public health practitioners bring deep community knowledge, strong relationships with local partners, and an ability to adapt creatively to local needs. They also tend to work with smaller teams and limited resources, serving populations spread across wide geographic areas.

Few public health resources are tailored to those conditions or offer practical strategies for advancing rural public health work, and approaches designed for urban settings may not reflect rural priorities or realities. As a result, rural practitioners often lack access to training that directly supports the challenges and opportunities they encounter in their daily work.

NORC is developing a competency-based training series tailored to rural public health practice.

Under a cooperative agreement with CDC’s Office of Rural Health, the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis is developing the Rural Public Health Training Series, with support from the East Tennessee State University Center for Rural Health and Research.

NORC began with a comprehensive needs assessment that included an environmental scan of existing training resources and interviews with rural practitioners across the country. Through this work, the project team identified gaps in training tailored to the realities of rural public health practice. Specifically, rural practitioners identified public health policy development, data analytics and assessment, and financial and grant management as high-priority training topics. Using these findings and the 2021 Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals, NORC developed a curriculum of eight modules addressing those priorities, as well as leadership and systems thinking, communication, public health sciences, and community partnerships.

NORC develops each module in collaboration with rural subject-matter experts, federal partners, and practicing rural public health professionals to ensure that the content is evidence-informed, practical, and responsive to local needs. Modules follow adult learning principles and are designed for the realities of rural practice. For example, the data and policy modules are organized around six-step processes practitioners can apply in their own communities, feature examples and case studies from rural health departments across the United States, and include opportunities for self-reflection and action planning.