In Washington, the capacity and activities of state and local public health agencies are measured against a set of public health standards that have been developed specifically for WA.  Public Health Agencies are required to submit documentation demonstrating compliance with the various and appropriate standards.  The state’s injury and violence prevention program included the core competencies as their guide to help meet the standards, especially in the areas of training, prevention, surveillance, and personnel.  They have used general personnel competencies in the past, but previously had not used any competencies specific to injury and violence.  In their documentation to the reviewers, they emphasized that it is the only nationally recognized set of injury prevention core competencies.  The injury and violence prevention program will integrate the core competencies in their work by routine review during staff work sessions, strategic planning meetings, and in their work with constituents and contractors.  They will discuss how to integrate the competencies into their on-going public health standards planning in order to move forward as a team over the next two years, by which time they have to show that they have made progress towards complying with the state standards.  The injury and violence prevention program received a favorable standards review, with the independent reviewers lauding the program’s use of the core competencies as “exemplary practice to meet the state’s public health standards”.

    PREVENT (Preventing Violence through Education, Networking and Technical Assistance) is a national violence prevention training initiative funded by the CDC and based out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The core competencies for injury and violence prevention were an important tool in the development of their curriculum for in-person trainings.  They focused mostly on competencies 1-6—definition of problem, using data, program planning, evaluation, program management, and communications.  They applied the competencies in two main ways.  First they were used in developing the initial assessment of training needs in the violence prevention field.  The competencies provided a benchmark of what to ask about training needs giving the needs assessment a framework from which to work.  Second, they took this needs assessment and the CDC’s project goals and mapped the competencies to those two documents.  The overlay of these three guides helped them review and edit down what they were actually going to teach in the curriculum.  The competencies helped give them confidence that what they were developing was taking a broader perspective than just their one needs assessment.  They were tying in to a very complete process of deciding what injury and violence prevention professionals need to know.  Throughout the curriculum development process, the competencies helped keep people focused on violence prevention as larger than just the skills in competency 9 (topic specific information).  It helped people understand the need for a breadth of knowledge as they developed their training program. 

    Billie Weiss, a long time practitioner in the field of violence prevention, was invited to speak at a statewide conference on leadership in injury prevention in CA.  In speaking to an audience from a broad array of injury and violence disciplines, she was asked to share from her experiences and to discuss next steps for the field.  She used the core competencies in injury and violence prevention as a tool to talk about the array of expertise that is expected of injury and violence prevention professionals and the ways in which the field must move forward in order to approach those standards.  She led the audience through every competency and most of the learning objectives and felt that the competencies helped create awareness about the field of injury prevention as a whole.

    Valodi Foster from the California Department of Health Services found the core competencies while seeking materials for use in a leadership training for injury prevention professionals.  She has used the competencies and the core competencies proficiency document to develop a self-assessment tool for leaders in injury and violence prevention.  She is presenting the tool in two workshops at the Childhood Injury Prevention Conference (www.cippp.org) in October 2005.  Each learning objective has a scale with which one can score themselves on a continuum of competency.   The self-assessment tool also provides for recording notes on education and experience relevant to each learning objective and identifying strategies for strengthening the competency.