Service And Professional Development: The Rhode Island Department Of Public Health Education

Service and Professional Development

Unfortunately, like others, I am not teaching at an education institution. However, as a public health employee, I might be considered a health educator. As many of you know, according to the American Public Health Association (APHA), the role of public health is to protect and improve the health of families and communities. However, to achieve this, public health employees educate via promotion of healthy habits, researching diseases, preventing injury and detecting and controlling diseases (CDC Foundation, n.d). However, while physicians treat those who are ill, public health professionals prevent illnesses. Therefore, the government has traditionally utilized two approaches to persuade people to change their behavior are education and regulation (Scheineder, 2016). In essence, education is an essential component of action to promote and prevent. In fact,

Isn’t this the concept of scholarship? However, as many have mentioned, there a teacher’s role involves teaching, promotes scholarship and requires internal or external service. At the Rhode Island Department of health we participate in both internal service and external service; however, I will focus on external service in this discussion. According to Ward (2003), external services are resources used by institutions to convey to various external stakeholders what it is that, in my cases, public health does to meet societal needs. In essence, these services include consulting, service learning and community service (Ward, 2003). Service in public health may be very different, but in principle, it relays back to the definition of service. According to Loftus et al., (2013), service conforms broader activities that are observed as contributing to the organization or raising its profile while engaging in outside professional