The Hawai‘i Public Health Training Hui is a group of collaborating public health professionals in the State of Hawaii. The Hui (means group or collaboration in the Hawaiian language) was established in 2006 to provide statewide workforce training, coordination, and collaboration to meet identified common public-health workforce continuing education, training, and technical-assistance needs. In 2008, it established itself with a set of bylaws and cooperating relationships to help each other in a collectively approach.
The Hui’s mission is to work collaboratively to empower Hawai‘i’s public health workforce with improved leadership, management, and decision-making skills, and stimulate creativity and innovation among local public-health personnel and community members who can improve the quality of the delivery of public-health services.
The Steering Committee for this dedicated group is composed of 14 members from ten different programs from three main organizations include the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa’s Department of Public Health Sciences, UH Cancer Center, Hawai‘i Public Health Institute dba Coalition for Tobacco Free Hawaii (CTFH), and various branches and divisions of the Department of Health, State of Hawai‘i including Injury Prevention, Tobacco, Asthma, & Diabetes Prevention and Education Programs.
The approach is to “pool” the financial resources from the members’ organizations and programs to pay for commonly-agreed trainings and conferences open to public health workforce members in the state of Hawaii. The non-profit member, Coalition for Tobacco Free Hawaii (CTFH) has agreed to carry out the financial administrative duties of Hui. The training topics are based on the needs assessments conducted periodically by the Hui steering committee. As the steering committee organizations partner and offer other professional trainings, planning meetings, workshops and conferences then the Hui votes to whether to co-sponsor these member events, too. It is estimated that more than 120 different organizations including various departments of University of Hawaii and programs in the Hawaii State Department of Health have participated in the trainings and create the existing network platform. More than 1,700 members exist on the list serv.
Valerie Yontz, PhD is the current chair of the Public Health Training Hui and has included funds from the Western Region Pacific Public Health Training Center through federal grant from Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) as part of this Public Health Training Hui joint training funds for workforce trainings in Hawaii.
