| Course | MPH 508 Leadership and Administration in Public Health Systems |
|---|---|
| Week | 6 |
| Paper type | Workforce development plan |
| Length | About 1,110 words, 5 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | Master of Public Health (MPH) |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for MPH 508 Week 6
Workforce Development Plan: Closing Three Demonstrated Gaps in the Merritt County Health Department's Dispensing Workforce, With Backfill, Retention and Changed Practice as the Measure
Student Name
Chamberlain University
MPH 508: Leadership and Administration in Public Health Systems
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Workforce Development Plan: Closing Three Demonstrated Gaps in the Merritt County Health Department's Dispensing Workforce, With Backfill, Retention and Changed Practice as the Measure
Scope
This plan covers the staff who would run medication dispensing for the county health department in Merritt County, a composite setting: the two preparedness staff, about 30 nurses and environmental health specialists assigned as dispensing site leads and screeners, and the contacts at closed dispensing partner sites. It begins from gaps shown in the department's own records, compares them with the national core competencies for public health professionals (Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice, 2021) and with the national dispensing capability (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018), and proposes development matched to each gap. It also addresses the two problems training alone cannot fix: who covers the work while staff train, and how to keep trained people.
The Gaps, Against a Framework
The department's after-action reports, exercise records and staff turnover data show three gaps.
Gap 1, site leadership. In the 2025 dispensing exercise, the site took 2 hours and 40 minutes to open against a target of 90 minutes. The after-action report traced the delay to site leads who had not opened a site before and did not know the layout or the order of tasks. Of 12 trained site leads in 2022, five remain. This is a gap in the core competency domain of leadership and systems thinking, as well as in the capability's activation function.
Gap 2, partner relationships. Three closed dispensing agreements lapsed in 2024 and 2025 after partner contacts changed. Only the coordinator had working relationships with partners, so no one else noticed. This is a gap in the community partnership skills domain, held by too few people.
Gap 3, data use. The department cannot report dispensing throughput by site in real time; in the exercise, tallies were made on paper and summed after the event. This is a gap in the data analytics and assessment domain.
Table 1
Workforce Gaps Shown in the Department's Records
| Gap | Evidence | Competency domain | Who holds the gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site leadership | Site opened in 2 h 40 min vs. 90 min target; 7 of 12 trained leads gone | Leadership and systems thinking | Site leads |
| Partner relationships | 3 agreements lapsed after contact turnover | Community partnership skills | All but the coordinator |
| Data use | Throughput summed on paper after exercise | Data analytics and assessment | Planner, site leads |
Note. Note. Composite figures from the department's exercise and staffing records, 2022 to 2025.
Development Matched to Each Gap
Gap 1 does not need a classroom course. Site leads already know the content; they lack practice. The plan replaces the annual two-hour lecture with three short drills a year in which each site lead opens a site in a real county building, timed, with a checklist, followed by a 20-minute debrief. Each new site lead shadows an experienced one during at least one drill before leading.
Gap 2 needs more people with relationships, not more training. Each of the eight senior nurses and environmental health specialists will be assigned two or three closed sites as a second contact, will join the coordinator on one visit a year and will be listed on the agreement. Rebmann et al. (2022) found that frequent contact and personal relationships were what planners relied on to keep closed sites engaged.
Gap 3 needs a tool and a short skills session. The planner will set up a simple shared spreadsheet form on tablets that tallies people served by site every 15 minutes, and site leads will learn it in the first drill. A one-day course on basic data visualization for the planner will cover how to turn the tallies into a dashboard for the incident commander.
Backfill
Staff cannot train if their regular work is not covered. Drills will be scheduled at the start of the month, when clinic caseload is lowest, and limited to 90 minutes. The community health division manager has agreed to block those slots in nurse schedules. For partner visits, the plan counts about 6 hours a year per senior staff member, which the division managers have reviewed.
Retention Alongside Development
The site lead gap is mainly a turnover gap. The department lost 7 of 12 trained leads in three years, mirroring national findings that a large share of the governmental public health workforce has left or intends to leave, with pay and workload among the reasons (Leider et al., 2023). Training more people who then leave does not close the gap. The plan therefore adds two retention steps the department controls: site lead duties will be written into job descriptions, so they count in performance reviews and for promotion, and staff who complete the site lead pathway will receive a county skills differential of $1,000 a year, which the health officer will request in the 2027 budget.
Costs, Including the Hidden Ones
Direct costs are modest: tablets and the spreadsheet service, about $2,000, and the visualization course, about $450. The hidden costs are larger. Three drills a year for 30 staff at 90 minutes each, plus debriefs, is about 160 staff hours a year. Partner visits add about 50 hours. The skills differential would cost about $12,000 a year if all 12 site leads qualified. These figures are included so the health officer can see the true cost before approving the plan.
Evaluated by Changed Practice
The plan will not be evaluated by how many staff attended training. It will be judged by three changes in practice: time to open a site in the year-end exercise, with a target of 90 minutes; the number of closed sites with a second named contact who has met the partner in person, with a target of all sites; and whether throughput by site is visible to the incident commander during the exercise, rather than after it. A fourth measure, the share of trained site leads still in post a year later, will show whether retention steps are working.
Timeline
Drills begin in September 2026 and run in September, January and May each year. Second-contact assignments for all nine current sites are made by October 2026 and extended to new sites as they are recruited. The throughput tool is built by November 2026 and first used in the January drill. Results on all four measures are reported to the health officer after the May 2027 exercise.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Public health emergency preparedness and response capabilities: National standards for state, local, tribal, and territorial public health. https://www.cdc.gov/readiness/media/pdfs/CDC_PreparednesResponseCapabilities_October2018_Final_508.pdf
Council on Linkages Between Academia and Public Health Practice. (2021). Core competencies for public health professionals. Public Health Foundation. https://phf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Core_Competencies_for_Public_Health_Professionals_2021October.pdf
Leider, J. P., Yeager, V. A., Kirkland, C., Krasna, H., Hare Bork, R., & Resnick, B. (2023). The state of the US public health workforce: Ongoing challenges and future directions. Annual Review of Public Health, 44, 323-341. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-071421-032830
Rebmann, T., Foerst, K., Charney, R. L., Mazzara, R. L., & Sandcork, J. (2022). Challenges in managing, sustaining, and assessing closed point of dispensing sites: Findings from a qualitative study. PLOS ONE, 17(7), e0271037. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271037
The Chamberlain MPH 508 Week 6 instructions
In the sixth week you plan workforce development for a public health organization or program. Start from gaps that records demonstrate, not subjects that seem worth covering. Compare current capability with a competency framework, such as the national core competencies, and identify who holds each gap. Match development to the gap, which may mean practice, coaching, new roles or tools rather than courses. Explain how work will be covered while staff develop. Address retention, since training people who then leave does not close a gap. Count costs, including staff time. Evaluate the plan by changes in practice, not by completion, and give a timeline for when each change will be measured.
How the MPH 508 Week 6 example is put together
The plan opens with three gaps from the department's records: a dispensing site that took 2 hours 40 minutes to open against a 90-minute target, three partner agreements lost after contacts changed, and throughput tallied on paper after an exercise. A table maps each to a core competency domain. Development replaces an annual lecture with timed drills, adds senior staff as second contacts for each partner site and introduces a simple tablet tally. Backfill uses low-caseload days. Retention steps write site lead duties into job descriptions and propose a skills differential, citing national workforce research. Hidden costs, about 210 staff hours a year, are counted, and four practice measures replace attendance.
Reading the MPH 508 Week 6 grading rubric
The predictable loss in a workforce plan is the course catalog: training organized by subject with no analysis showing it is needed. Evaluation by completion, counting staff who finished a course and saying nothing about practice, is the second common weakness. Plans that ignore backfill, so staff cannot attend, and plans that treat turnover as outside their scope also lose marks. Hidden costs such as staff hours are often left out. Strong plans demonstrate gaps from records, map them to a framework, match development to each gap, cover backfill, address retention, count all costs and judge success by changed practice measured against a baseline.
MPH 508 Week 6 help: mistakes that cost points
Workforce plans are easier to write as lists of training than as responses to evidence. If you share the program and any records of exercises, audits or turnover, we can help you identify demonstrated gaps, map them to the core competencies and choose development that fits each gap. We can also help you count hidden costs and write practice measures your supervisor would accept. Your organization and choices remain your own. If your section uses a different competency framework, such as a discipline-specific one, tell us and the custom sample will map gaps to it. We can also help you separate gaps that training can close from gaps that retention or new roles must close.
Get a MPH-508 Week 6 example written to your instructions
Send the Week 6 instructions with the competency framework your section names and your workforce context, and a custom example is written to that framework and returned inside 24 to 48 hours. The first one is free. Which gaps matter most stays your judgment to defend.
More MPH 508 papers and MPH samples
- MPH 508 Week 1: Leadership Self-Assessment
- MPH 508 Week 2: Leading Without Authority Post
- MPH 508 Week 3: Leadership Theory Analysis
- MPH 508 Week 4: Organizational Assessment
- MPH 508 Week 5: Budget Justification
- MPH 508 Week 7: Strategic Plan
- MPH 508 Week 8: Leadership Reflection
- MPH 507 Week 6: Evaluation Design Paper
- MPH 506 Week 6: Community Environmental Assessment
- MPH 505 Week 6: Health Campaign Plan
- MPH 500 Week 6: Stakeholder Analysis
MPH 508 Week 6 questions, answered
Why does retention belong in a development plan?
Because developing somebody increases their value to other employers as well as to yours. A plan that builds capability with nothing holding people in post is funding somebody else's workforce, which is a real pattern in public health where salaries lag. Naming what makes staying worthwhile is what turns training expenditure into organizational capacity.
Is training always the answer?
Rarely on its own. Gaps caused by unclear expectations, unmanageable caseloads or absent supervision are not solved by a course, and a plan that sends people to training for a structural problem produces frustration and no change. Matching the intervention to the cause of the gap is the analytical work the assignment is actually testing.
How do I evaluate development?
By something observable in practice afterward: a task done differently, a review that finds fewer errors, a supervision record that shows a decision handled better. Completion rates measure attendance. Where practice change is hard to observe, say so and propose the closest proxy rather than falling back on how many people finished.
Where can I find a free MPH 508 Week 6 sample paper?
The full MPH 508 Week 6 workforce development plan for a county dispensing workforce, with gaps mapped to core competencies, is on this page.
How does the MPH 508 Week 6 sample measure success?
By time to open a site, second contacts at every partner site, throughput visible during the exercise and trained site leads still in post a year later.