Many Maryland communities struggle with a variety of health problems like substance abuse, mental health crises, and other chronic health issues that require both prevention and intervention efforts. One of the ways to develop solutions to these growing problems is by streamlining efforts in public health education and outreach.
A new multi-institutional Prevention Learning Portal aims to provide the latest training in science-based public health education for people who work directly with their communities, focusing on evidence-based programming and how to implement those programs successfully. University of Maryland Extension educators Dr. Ali Hurtado, associate professor in the School of Public Health and Dr. Alex Chan, Extension mental health specialist, partnered with Penn State University to develop this comprehensive set of free, online trainings to help align outreach efforts in substance use prevention and other public health crises.
The portal offers practical tools that assist with follow through from planning stages into actual implementation. “This is not theoretical, it’s very practical,” said Chan. “The people who will use this system are interested in building community change. They might see there is a lack of unity in how their community addresses substance abuse or other health crises, so the portal provides some basic science behind community outreach so that people can be more unified in how they address those problems.”
The eLearning Portal tackles a variety of topics to provide basic information on engaging state and local government, how to create evidence-based programs, implementation science, and how to work with youth groups. Each course provides a self-paced module with video assets and interactive components to create an engaging experience, and is designed to provide deeper insight for users on how early prevention efforts can help keep health problems from becoming community crises.
“Our goal is to help keep people from reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch when they face these issues in their communities,” Chan said. “We already have a lot of good science, like how to reach people and how to create good community programs related to health – not just substance use, but health in general.
“We really looked at community pillars and assessed what we can do, where we can support our people,” said Chan. “This can be of use to multiple different agencies like health departments, schools, nonprofits, and Extension educators – it really targets the people who are working to educate the community.”
The Prevention Learning Portal is a free resource available to anyone interested in creating community health programs; simply sign up for login credentials and choose courses that match the outreach goals. The Prevention Learning Portal is supported by a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
To learn more about the portal, or to sign up for a free account to access the trainings, go to https://go.umd.edu/PreventionLearningPortal.