Competency-Based Assessment of Public Health Professionals in the Northeastern Region, Thailand:An Exploratory Factors Analysis

Competency-based assessment of health professionals is important required for human resource for health development in Thailand. There are various efforts to improve a professional standard in public health professionals, but there is a lack of understanding of the competency of public health professionals, especially the competency-based assessment suitable for public health professionals. This study aimed to investigate the competency of public health professionals at the primary care service level in Northeastern, Thailand.

This research is a quantitative cross-sectional survey. Data collected by a questionnaire was conducted in 862 public health professionals in the northeast of Thailand. The exploratory factor analysis (EFA) method was applied to analyze the correlation effects of the 30 estimating competency-based assessment.

The results were revealed that their competency-based assessment as three aspects following: (1) Health care analysis and management (2) Public Health Professional Sciences (3) Basic Health Sciences. Additionally, The 3 groups of competency-based assessment were included 30 items suitable for the current sample. These factors accounted for 66.60% of the variance.

In conclusion, this finding is significantly recommendations to policy makers to improve and initiate a new policy or guidelines for public health education and human resource for health production and management in Thailand on the basis of their specific needs. Especially, the competency-based assessment from this research provide an excellent framework for developing a public health curriculum in the future in Thailand.