A Typology of US Public Health Work-Education Programs.

Objective: A pipeline is required to build a qualified and diverse public health workforce. Work-education programs offer public health students experiential learning, training, and a pathway to public health professions. However, there is a gap in the literature to guide public health practice on the types of programs, their components, and their potential impact. By defining and differentiating work-education programs, we aim to provide public health practitioners a useful tool to advance public health careers.

Design: We conducted a scoping review of US-based public health work-education programs and performed a content analysis to extract, analyze, and synthesize data to develop a typology of programs in the US. We searched CINAHL, ERIC, PsycInfo, PubMed and Web of Science databases for papers published between January 1, 2012, and December 31, 2022.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion criteria included programs with a description, intervention design, student characteristics, setting characteristics, and program outcomes if available. Exclusion criteria included programs with no description, that focused on the expansion of a specific clinical profession (ie, dentistry), that were implemented outside of the US, and that targeted exclusively high school students.

Study selection: The search resulted in 650 references, which yielded 35 articles from 33 interventions.

Main outcome measures: The main outcome measures were qualitative and included program design, features, and implementation.

Results: We identified 3 types of programs: those that (1) expose students to public health (n = 6), (2) guide students to specific public health professions (n = 12), and (3) connect students with organizations for public health practice (n = 15). Program types were influenced by student participants, setting, and program components.

Conclusions: This typology illustrates the spectrum of work-education programs and their variability in design and implementation. The typology has utility for practitioners to identify programmatic aspects that may be feasible and desirable in the context of their practice.