Training needs assessment tools for the public health workforce at an institutional and individual level: a review.

"assessing and understanding public health workforce capacities is a prerequisite to prepare both organizations and the workforce to effectively address prepare for and respond to health challenges 'a capacity assessment identifies capacity on three levels: individual organizational and enabling environment' ( supplementary data 1 ).; the search was conducted between 6 and 16 february 2022 and was centered around three key domains: (i) public health workforce and education (ii) assessment and tools and (iii) training needs and capacity building ( supplementary data 2 ).; the retrieved literature was assessed for eligibility and no relevant results were excluded in phases: (i) title (ii) full text and (iii) eligibility criteria described per domain ( supplementary data 3 ).; the information about the workforce studied was further categorized based on 'employer type' 'what functions the worker performed' 'the worker's occupation' the 'worker's prior training' 'self-identify' ( supplementary data 1 ) and authors' own definition.; jbi does not have a toolkit for mix-methods studies therefore the mixed methods appraisal tool version 2018 was used ( supplementary data 4 ).; after reading the titles abstracts and full text applying inclusion criteria and quality assessment 38 documents were included for evidence synthesis ( supplementary data 5 and 6 ).; thirty-five documents found that organizations have created their own tools to assess training needs in their public health workforce at institutional and individual levels ( supplementary data 7 and 8 ).; three documents identified organizations that created their own frameworks that could be adapted into a tool to assess tna ( supplementary data 9 )."

"Conflicts of interest : None declared. Key pointsTraining needs assessment (TNA) is a useful tool to assess and understand public health workforce and their capacities that are essential to delivering organizations’ functions and services.TNA also identifies the relations between these levels, gaps in capacities, competencies and know-how.To conduct a TNA, the organizations need to define key concepts such as a definition of public health based on functions and services, and a definition of public health workforce based on standard classification of occupations or job taxonomies relevant to their organizational environment.Public health organizations use various methods to conduct a TNA including questionnaires, surveys, interviews, focus groups, Delphi techniques, questionnaires, a matrix, literature review or a combined methodology.There are multiple challenges when performing a TNA: (i) the definition of the study population, (ii) the type of assessment (individual, organizational or both) and (iii) methods and tools used to collect data."