Health policy training for health equity leaders

Abstract

Health professional training programs increasingly recognize the importance of health policy training. Despite integration of this training into health professional education, there have been limited published studies about health policy training and few studies that meaningfully measure and evaluate learner outcomes. The Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine developed a multidisciplinary, post-doctoral, health policy fellowship program in 2009, uniquely focused at the intersections of health policy, health equity, and leadership development. The program curriculum was intentionally designed with desired learner outcomes, aligning training and learner experiences with these outcomes, and meaningfully capturing and measuring outcomes in program evaluation. We present our training approach as well as results from an alumni survey assessing learner outcomes one to five years post fellowship completion. To our knowledge, this is the first study that evaluates the longitudinal impact of health policy training on the career trajectories of program graduates. We believe this offers a number of opportunities for replication and translation across health professional training programs.