Developing Public Health Emergency Response Leaders in Incident Management: A Scoping Review of Educational Interventions

Abstract

During emergency responses, public health leaders frequently serve in incident management roles that differ from their routine job functions. Leaders’ familiarity with incident management principles and functions can influence response outcomes. Therefore, training and exercises in incident management are often required for public health leaders. To describe existing methods of incident management training and exercises in the literature, we queried 6 English language databases and found 786 relevant articles. Five themes emerged: (1) experiential learning as an established approach to foster engaging and interactive learning environments and optimize training design; (2) technology-aided decision support tools are increasingly common for crisis decision-making; (3) integration of leadership training in the education continuum is needed for developing public health response leaders; (4) equal emphasis on competency and character is needed for developing capable and adaptable leaders; and (5) consistent evaluation methodologies and metrics are needed to assess the effectiveness of educational interventions. These findings offer important strategic and practical considerations for improving the design and delivery of educational interventions to develop public health emergency response leaders. This review and ongoing real-world events could facilitate further exploration of current practices, emerging trends, and challenges for continuous improvements in developing public health emergency response leaders.

Attitudes and Response Capacities for Public Health Emergencies of Healthcare Workers in Primary Healthcare Institutions: A Cross-Sectional Investigation Conducted in Wuhan, China, in 2020

“…PHE education and training had important impacts on response capacities, which had been researched in many studies [20][21][22]. However, studies have paid more attention to emergency management education and PHE training of leaders [23]. The related education and training were also important amongst healthcare workers in the analysis so they could understand the whole management, more clearly see what they could do, and understand the value of the prevention and control of PHEs.…”

Drivers and collaborative governance of public health emergency response in the context of digital city

“…This mainly involved experiential learning, technology assisted decision support tools, leadership, adaptability, and character. The research results indicated that these training contents enhanced the emergency management ability of leaders ( 11 ). Chiang et al ( 12 ) conducted a qualitative study to determine the factors that motivated federal public health workers to continue working on-site during emergencies.…”

“…Li et al ( 11 ) obtained information from multiple databases through literature review to cultivate the emergency management ability of leaders in PHE. This mainly involved experiential learning, technology assisted decision support tools, leadership, adaptability, and character.…”

Adaptive leadership of doctors during COVID-19

“…However, adaptive leadership in health care and doctors’ crisis leadership have not been examined in depth beyond the doctor-patient dynamics (Anderson et al , 2015). Personal competencies, though important for crisis leadership in public health (Li et al , 2021), are not adequately examined and researchers have to refer to other sectors such as the military and aviation (Deitchman, 2013). Furthermore, competency frameworks, though useful, are mostly universal irrespective of contextual factors, individual differences and existing and future and work requirements (Bolden and Gosling, 2006).…”