The National Health Educator Competencies Update Project: Celebrating a Milestone and Recommending Next Steps to the Profession

Abstract

For more than 60 years, the health education profession has worked to develop, implement, and refine guidelines for preparing and training health educators. Among the seminal works documenting this dedication to, and quest for, quality assurance in professional preparation and practice are guidelines for professional education of health educators (1943), criteria and guidelines for accreditation of graduate programs in community health education (1969), guidelines for teacher education (1969) and safety and school health (1974), a framework for competency-based curricula for entry-level health educators (1985), and standards for the preparation of graduate-level health educators (1997) (American Association for Health Education [AAHE], National Commission for Health Education Credentialing, Inc. [NCHEC], Society for Public Health Education [SOPHE], 1999). In 1989, the NCHEC granted the first credential for certified health education specialists (CHES), which today number more than 12,000. These accomplishments have been the work of many health education pioneers with both the grist and guts to passionately pursue a vision that ultimately raised the stature of health education as a true profession.