November 2010 - Program Updates

Competency-Based Performance Management for Public Health Toolkit: Demonstration Sites Initiative

In 2009, the Ontario Public Health Association and partner health units — City of Hamilton Public Health Services; Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge Health Unit; Toronto Public Health; and Thunder Bay Health Unit — completed the development of the Competency-Based Employee Performance Management for Public Health Toolkit (Version 1.0 and Version 2.0).

Throughout 2010, the partners have been actively promoting the new tools through a multi-faceted knowledge translation and exchange strategy. The goal of this strategy has been to educate the 36 health units across Ontario about competency-based performance management and its potential contribution to improving and strengthening the public health workforce.

OPHA and its partners agree that further ‘real-time’ testing and evaluation of the Toolkit – its tools and associated processes – are critical to assessing the applicability, adaptability and utility of these tools within a public health workforce setting. There is a need to examine the feasibility of these tools and establish whether they can be realistically adopted for use by different public health organizations.

In addition, we wanted to assess the intended and unintended outcomes of implementing the Toolkit on integrating core competencies and performance management. For example: What impact does use of the Competency-Based Performance Management Toolkit have on awareness, knowledge and application of the core competencies? How does its use affect employees’ attitudes towards the performance management process?

To answer these questions a demonstration pilot project is now underway in the City of Hamilton, Public Health Services; Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge Health Unit; Toronto Public Health; and, Porcupine Health Unit. To support the pilot project, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Ontario Nunuvuk Branch has funded the development of an evaluation design and a set of evaluation tools. Dayna Albert, from OPHA’s Towards Evidence Informed Practice program was contracted to develop the evaluation design and the evaluation questionnaires.

Participating health units gathered in Toronto on October 14, 2010 to discusss the pilot implementation process and provide feedback on the tools. The pilots will get underway between November 2010 and February 2011 and are scheduled for completion early in 2012. The participating health units are discussing methods of collaboration to review the evaluation findings once the pilots are complete.

To view the competency-based performance management orientation module, e-learning module, and tool kit, please visit www.corecompetencies.ca.