Brown School Offers Training in Pandemic Preparedness and Response

A new online program brings together Brown School experts in public health, social work and public policy to help health and social service professionals respond to and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Foundations of Pandemic Preparedness & Response is a five-part, 20-hour program that provides a self-paced, online curriculum and toolkit designed to build basic understanding and skills in epidemiology, surveillance and response, communication, mitigation and recovery, and public health and policy.

“Our goal is to provide professionals with the best possible evidence-based responses to the pandemic,” said Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. She noted that Brown School faculty from a wide range of disciplines curated credible, open-source resources for participants from diverse sites that included trusted government sources, NGO websites, peer-reviewed papers and videos.

“We wanted to create a scaled-down set of information sources so participants don’t have to cull through everything that’s available,” McKay said. “We want them to share these resources.”

The online course, part of the school’s Open Classroom initiative, includes lectures, quizzes, assignments and self study. The five modules can be taken individually or as a package that leads to successful participants receiving a certificate of completion. 

Participants who complete the full program will be able to:

• Understand and apply basic epidemiology concepts and methods to describe infectious disease trends.
• Apply a transdisciplinary lens to pandemic surveillance.
• Analyze and compare risk factors with a view towards preventing and controlling infections.
• Develop public health risk communication approaches for diverse audiences.
• Design prevention, response, and recovery interventions with attention to disparities.
• Apply transdisciplinary strategies for community mitigation, policy development and advocacy.

Enrollment in the full program costs $100. Participants may register for modules individually at a cost of $25 each. For Brown School stakeholders, such as students, alumni, faculty or field instructors, the cost is $60 for the full program and $15 per module.

The Brown School offers accredited programs in social work and public health and is an approved provider of social work CEUs in Missouri and Illinois; this program is eligible for self-study units. Mental health license holders from other disciplines and states should consult their licensing body about our program’s eligibility for license renewal.

Learn more and register for any or all of the modules.