Our contribution to international public health workforce development: Training at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Jerusalem

The School of Public Health & Community Medicine at Hebrew University- Hadassah, Jerusalem, Israel, has nearly 40 years of experience in international public health training. Since 1971, some 700 health professionals from 85 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America have graduated our International Master of Public Health (IMPH) program. An even larger number of Israelis (Jews and Arabs) completed the local MPH course. The urgent international need for trained public health personnel identified by the School founders in the early-1970s, remains as pertinent for the twenty-first century as it was then. The School's academic philosophy dictated the development of an integrated training in research methodology (e.g., epidemiology, biostatistics, social and behavioral sciences) with the study of major public health issues, and their application in public health practice in the community. Training in Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC) which integrates individual clinical care with public health is a major element of our IMPH, based on the pioneering work in rural South Africa in the 1940's by Sidney Kark and team and further developed and evaluated in Jerusalem and in countries such as the UK, Spain, and South Africa. The Braun School has been active over the past decade in training health professionals from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union , where our faculty has also provided direct support to help launch new schools of public health. We will showcase examples of the contribution that this training experience has made to the public health practice, teaching, and institutional development in countries with very different socio-cultural characteristics worldwide. We will describe the impact of IMPH graduates along with our experience with short training programs, a doctoral program for outstanding MPH graduates, and grants to facilitate the re-entry of IMPH graduates into the workforce.