Curriculum
Core Concepts
The Management Academy curriculum is built around six core concepts that help managers:
Improve skills
Management Academy improves individual skills in managing information, managing people, and managing money. The Academy helps managers build the finance skills necessary to track budget performance, make assumptions, and figure costs; build information skills to find and analyze data, communicate findings, and measure outcomes; and build the people skills necessary to delegate, manage partnerships, and work effectively in teams.
When we learned about civic entrepreneurship, partnerships
and collaboration, I think all of those concepts came into focus
for us with the development of our Business Plan.
Work in small groups
Management knowledge and skills are best learned in small groups with plenty of interactive exercises and practical application. Academy cohorts each comprise about fifty managers, and courses include frequent break-out sessions.
Transfer training to the workplace
The Management Academy is designed to build individual skills, but also to help managers transfer those skills to the workplace in order to create organizational change.
On the individual level, managers create and execute individual development plans that help them measure progress and demonstrate success through concrete changes in the workplace. In addition, Management Academy teams write public health business plans that require them to demonstrate their ability to assess health needs, analyze markets, create budgets, design evaluation measures, and mobilize community partners.
Build teams
If the efficiency and effectiveness of health agencies working on community health is to improve, we must do more than improve individual managers. That's why teams of three to six managers from each participating organization are selected for the Academy. Governmental teams are urged to include a manager from outside their agency--a school manager, hospital manager, or non-profit partner, for instance. Hospital-based and other community-based teams should include a public health manager as well.
Create a network
Managers will continue learning if they strengthen their professional networks. The Academy will help you build relationships with health professionals across your region, from a variety of parts of the public health system, inside and outside government.
Provide context
Managers must learn to apply new management skills in a population health setting. Faculty from Kenan-Flagler and the School of Public Health have jointly designed and taught each course in the curriculum based on extensive research and experience with managers in the public health system. Many of the case studies and small-group exercises also require managers to learn from other sectors; peers and faculty help managers apply that knowledge to population health concerns.
The curriculum was not designed to develop readiness for bioterrorism, but a survey of past graduates suggests that the general management skills developed in the Management Academy for Public Health transfer readily. MAPH-trained managers developed partnership skills, strategic planning skills, communication skills, and people management skills through the program, and used those skills in handling the aftermath of bioterror attacks.
Some states have already used BT training funds for MAPH teams. Contact us for more information.