The Public Health Bulletin Technical Resource Hub offers a one-stop shop for editorial teams

A Public Health Bulletin (PHB) strengthens public health surveillance systems and programs by communicating information to help health practitioners detect and respond to or prevent outbreaks. It also creates a record of country-specific health data not often published in scientific journals, making it available for future research. These national publications are tools for disseminating information, providing transparency, and building trust with the public. 

Launching and sustaining a national PHB is a multi-disciplinary team effort. It requires government support, skilled epidemiologists, writers and editors, graphic designers, website masters, and communications personnel to publish and disseminate quality issues. Articles published in a PHB must meet the same standards of scientific rigor as those of a scientific journal. This led to the CDC Foundation and U.S. CDC creating the Public Health Bulletin Technical Resource Hub (PHB Hub).

The Data for Health Initiative PHB Project

Since 2016, U.S. CDC and the CDC Foundation, with support from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative, have supported 19 low- and middle-income countries in establishing and strengthening national PHBs. The CDC Foundation shares the knowledge gained and resources developed over the past ten years on the PHB Hub to make them freely available and easy to access—all on one site. Many of these resources were developed based on national public health institutes’ (NPHI) experiences of launching PHBs. Contributing NPHIs include, but are not limited to: Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia. The PHBs of these and other countries can be accessed on the PHB Hub.

Many of these contributing institutes are members of the International Association of National Public Health Institutes (IANPHI), and the peer-to-peer exchange among them has helped shape the resources found on the Hub. Côte d’Ivoire’s Institut National de Santé Publique, for example, launched the country’s first public health bulletin in 2023 with support from IANPHI and U.S. CDC, and has since shared what it learned with Burkina Faso and other Francophone institutes through a regional exchange workshop in Abidjan.

PHB Resources

The PHB Hub provides best practices and resources organized by the following phases of publishing and disseminating a PHB: planning and producing articles, disseminating final issues, evaluating the quality and impact of the publication, and offering training to advance the skills of contributing writers and editors. Case studies offer a look at how to engage Field Epidemiology Training Program residents in article writing and how to index a PHB.

Additional resources available on the PHB Hub include an online writing course, sustainability frameworks, evaluation tools and guidance documents for scientific writing and reviewing processes. A few resources are highlighted below:

• The online course, Writing for Public Health Bulletins, provides nine free, self-guided modules that help participants improve their scientific writing skills and understand the standards and best practices for scientific writing. The aim of the course is to support writers in developing epidemiological reports for publication in national PHBs
• The Public Health Bulletin Maturity Model provides a progressive set of characteristics and functions that serve as benchmarks to be used by editors and internal stakeholders to assess PHB capacities and develop work plans.
• The PHB Quality Scorecard is a one-page spreadsheet with six domains used to assess the quality of a public health bulletin.

The CDC Foundation’s Data for Health team will continue to update the website to meet the needs of PHB editorial teams. Feedback is always welcome. Please complete the support form to submit any questions or suggestions.