The Work

Policymaker Training Curriculum for the Virginia Commonwealth

Working with the Virginia Department of Health, the Institute for Public Health Innovation is designing a curriculum for training the Governor's Cabinet Secretaries and their staff. The purpose of the course is to position the Commonwealth of Virginia as a best practice model in using Healthy People 2020 (HP 2020) to inform and guide statewide health and public policy decisions to promote health and health equity. The course does this by expanding understanding about the determinants of health (i.e. how work outside of the health department affects health) and encouraging inter-departmental collaboration to address wide-ranging health and quality of life issues. The curriculum uses adult education learning principles and both traditional and experiential dialogue to convey health determinants concepts.