Understanding quality: a guide for developers and consumers of public health emergency preparedness trainings.

The work described in this article represents two years of collaboration among 32 evaluators from 23 schools of public health involved in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Centers for Public Health Preparedness program. Evaluators in public health emergency preparedness (PHEP) training were tasked with identifying what constitutes quality in PHEP training and providing guidance to practitioners in selecting training packages. The results of their deliberations included development and selection of guidelines for a high-quality course, a justification of the guidelines, and a Training Selection System (TSS) to assist in analyzing extant trainings. In this article, we present the TSS (along with explanatory notes for each of its sections), preliminary feedback from practitioners, and a discussion of next steps.