ECDC capacity and training needs assessment 2018
This report summarises the results and data collected through the 2018 ECDC capacity and training needs assessment survey. The assessments, which are carried out every three years, focus on the European Union (EU) Member States and the European Economic Area (EEA) countries.
Executive Summary
The 2018 survey consisted of two questionnaires which asked countries to report on the capacity of the workforce, perceived training needs and the relevance of ECDC training in the field of communicable disease prevention and control.
Of the 31 countries invited to participate, nine responded to the workforce capacity assessment survey and fourteen responded to the training needs assessment survey.
Only a few countries have a mechanism or legal instrument in place for workforce planning and development in the area of public health. Hardly any of the countries are able to recruit sufficient number of staff to work in the area of communicable disease due to a lack of qualified applicants. Another issue affecting recruitment and retention of staff in most countries is the ageing of the workforce and subsequent retirement. Almost all countries provided an outline of the organisation/structure/staffing of their communicable disease (CD) prevention and control service, however data on the size of the workforce and estimates of the percentage of working time spent on communicable diseases for each job profile are difficult to collect. Many countries offer training programmes leading to specialisation and training activities for professional development. They also have a set of competencies used for professional development in communicable disease prevention and control, but not always used to measure acquisition of individual competency.
The countries reported the following domains as their highest training needs priorities: public health emergency preparedness, surveillance and response and communication and advocacy. They also indicated that training organised by ECDC is considered to be of added value for all the domains, in particular for communication and advocacy and public health emergency preparedness. The field of vaccination and vaccine hesitancy was flagged up as an area where training is needed. Finally, the countries indicated that for all the domains a blended format (combination of e-learning and face-to-face) would be the most suitable for ECDC-organised continuous professional learning opportunities.
ECDC used the qualitative and quantitative data collected on training needs to inform its annual planning. Preliminary results of the 2018 survey were used to plan ECDC training activities (e.g. face-to-face courses, e-learning courses and simulation exercises in 2019 and 2020) and to inform the planning of future initiatives (e.g. multi-annual projects involving training on vaccination and how to tackle vaccine hesitancy and training on how to conduct after-action reviews).
