PHTP’s Vision and Mission:
The Vision: To offer to Micronesians, and other Pacificans alike, opportunities for education and training in Public Health that are appropriate, desirable, dynamic, flexible and practice-oriented.
The Mission: To present PHTP’s quality education and practice-centred training at times, sites and modes most suitable to learning-determined students.
PHTP’s operative definition of Public Health: the science and art of preventing disease and injury, prolonging quality life and promoting the health of populations though the organized effort of societies.
PHTP is an academic response to the public health situation in Micronesia’s Freely Associated States (FAS), including the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). There has been a demand for:
- Public health workers to be trained in Micronesian institutions with an accredited qualification, preferably at the post secondary level;
- The development of human resources for health to be institutionalized locally in a career track process with incremental and additive life-long learning as the fundamental academic philosophy and structure;
- Academically combining public health practice and continuing education into a seamless articulation with other accredited academic programs and qualifications from credible public health training institutions in the Pacific and Pacific Rim countries; and
- The overall aim of public health training and practice to be aimed at: a) decrease vulnerability; and b) increase the resilience of communities to the adverse external and internal forces of socioeconomic transformations, migration, demographic changes, globalization, natural disasters and other related societal developments.
The PHTP academic program has taken into account the current academic and educational realities of the region and in addition, takes an approach incorporating the need to:
- Urgently train or re-train the current public health workers and be cognizant of the concurrent need for replacement and succession of an aging and mobile workforce;
- Provide bridging teaching and learning opportunities for professional public health practitioners;
- Identify gaps and address these in the health professional training, through the improvement of the educational pipeline;
- Additively build professionalism, self-esteem and enthusiasm of public health workers;
- Encourage the rational performance review and the development of the public health infrastructure through professional licensure, establishment of criteria for promotion, and improved remuneration and incentives that are linked to professional efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness and equity;
- Provide all public health workers with a healing capability for primary health care to be perceived as more than “health police”, e.g. trained in basic life support, first aid, and traditional medicine treatments; and
- Enable the community to access affordable and acceptable available public health services.
The PHTP academic program takes realistically into account that high school graduates would need significant induction into the Health domain, and, when referring to health workforce, it builds on a bridging approach, starting from practice and moving, with conceptual development, towards comprehensive competence in Micronesian Public Health. This approach enables public health practitioners and students alike to develop intellectual agility to be innovative; and deal with the ever changing physical, social and political environments of public health practice. Such adaptability is essential for Pacific public health workers who are expected to have multiple responsibilities at all levels of health practice and in diverse locations, ethnic and socio-political environments within all the Micronesian jurisdictions.
