New Competency Framework Aims to Train Public Health Experts for a Wellbeing Economy

What does it actually take, skill by skill, for a public health professional to help steer an economy that puts people and planet before profit? A team of researchers from Maastricht University, Public Health Wales, Jagiellonian University and the Hertie School has now produced one of the most concrete answers yet to that question. In a scoping review published in Public Health Reviews, Pablo Rodríguez-Feria, Katarzyna Czabanowska, Mariana Dyakova, Natalia Giraldo-Noack and Timo Clemens propose a competency framework for the wellbeing economy in public health, organizing 31 competencies within five domains. The work, conducted in affiliation with WHO Collaborating Centres for public health leadership and investment for health and wellbeing, arrives at a moment when governments and multilateral institutions are racing to turn a fashionable policy slogan into an operational discipline.

The wellbeing economy, as the authors frame it, is an economy that prioritizes people and planet over profit. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines the Economy of Wellbeing as the capacity to create a virtuous circle in which citizens’ wellbeing drives economic prosperity, stability and resilience, and vice versa, with good macroeconomic outcomes sustaining wellbeing investments over time. According to the review, the concept is gaining support among governments, policymakers, budget holders, businesses and civil society, and it has been adopted in various forms by countries including Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, Finland, Iceland, Costa Rica and Bhutan. Wales, for instance, has enacted the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act 2015 and the Social Partnership and Public Procurement Act 2023, while New Zealand introduced a Wellbeing Budget in 2019 focused on child wellbeing and economic transformation.

The technical backbone of the new framework is a set of four cross-cutting policy priorities put forward by the World Health Organization, known as wellbeing capitals, which integrate human, social, planetary and economic wellbeing. Healthy societies, the authors note, build economies that ensure the prosperity of people, civil society and the planet by maintaining universal policies for housing and food, lifelong learning and literacy, and a stable ecological balance, with equity, inclusion and sustainability as guiding principles. Although many countries have recognized these four capitals as critical and direction-setting, the review points out that they had not been integrated into wellbeing economy research so far. That gap matters because WHO/EURO has identified twelve stakeholder groups that should undertake four key actions to promote, implement and evaluate the wellbeing economy approach, and the public health workforce operates across many of them, from academia and ministries to banks and funding bodies.

Methodologically, the team followed the Joanna Briggs Institute guidance for scoping reviews and the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews, registering a protocol on the Open Science Framework. The review used the JBI mnemonic PCC, with population attributed to public health reflecting the health of people and the planet, the concept of interest being the wellbeing economy and its capitals, and the context comprising competency-based education and training frameworks. The researchers searched four databases, Medline via PubMed, EMBASE via Ovid, Global Health via EBSCOHost and ERIC via EBSCOHost, with the final database search conducted on January 15, 2025. They then supplemented this with targeted searches of multilateral organizations, including the WHO European Wellbeing Economy Initiative, the WHO Institutional Repository for Information Sharing, the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, the OECD and the World Bank, followed by backward and forward handsearching and direct contact with corresponding authors.

The scale of the screening effort was considerable. A total of 3,965 titles were identified through the four mechanisms, and after deduplication in Rayyan, pilot testing and independent full-text review, 27 documents representing 23 units of analysis were included. From these, the team extracted 38 frameworks, 54 domains and 423 competencies. The synthesis relied on a cross-walking process methodology previously used to study competencies in public health professional education: competencies were extracted and confirmed by two authors, verbs and descriptions were analyzed to eliminate duplicates and identify emerging competencies, and each competency was then mapped against one or all four actions of the wellbeing economy. Where the mapping revealed knowledge gaps that could not be filled from the literature, the researchers proposed new competencies themselves.

The result is a proposed Competency Framework with five domains and 31 competencies, 30 derived from the review and one proposed by the researchers. Domain one, Ethics and professionalism, contains five competencies covering self-awareness of one’s own behavior and values regarding humanity, acting openly and transparently according to the rule of law, understanding cultural differences by examining unconscious bias, challenging power differentials, and making evidence-informed decisions. Domain two, Determinants of health and wellbeing, is the largest with eight competencies, spanning action on wider determinants including climate and environmental change, protection of the environment, housing security, access to healthy foods and reduction of food insecurity, employment security and workplace fairness, school enrollment and literacy, access to quality primary care, and assessment of the long-term impacts of the economy on neighborhood-level advantage.

Domain three, Digital transformation and data literacy, reflects the increasingly technical character of modern public health practice. Its five competencies include distinguishing and using diverse data sources to interpret and evaluate health information and digital content, sorting facts from misinformation and disinformation, addressing gaps in digital literacy and integrating them into education and training programs, engaging and empowering citizens and communities to participate in the wellbeing economy through digital media, and promoting public understanding and awareness of artificial intelligence technologies. The inclusion of AI literacy is notable, and the source material the team drew on included OECD work on digital government skills, the DigComp 2.2 framework for citizens’ digital competence, and OECD analyses of the impact of digital technologies on wellbeing.

Domain four, Policy, politics and governance, contains six competencies focused on working across systems and sectors. These include contributing to systems that strengthen collaboration, communication and coordination across sectors and stakeholders for societal wellbeing, engaging with multiple governing sectors from local to international levels, making informed judgments about complex wellbeing and health policy issues, securing sustainable funding for health and wellbeing programs, engaging in policy development and implementation, and developing adaptive global health security frameworks with continuous monitoring, evaluation and improvement. Domain five, Building capacity for sustainable wellbeing economy, holds seven competencies emphasizing lifelong learning, leadership and entrepreneurship as agents of change, systems thinking and critical thinking to understand key drivers of wellbeing outcomes, economic evaluation methods to capture wider social benefits of health programs, expansion of provision and funding of care, social care, education and transportation services, improvement of regulation and funding of macroeconomic systems for wellbeing goals, and the use of tools to steer economic investment toward wellbeing goals.

The authors argue that the framework fills a genuine void. Existing competency frameworks for the public health workforce, such as the WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework for the Public Health Workforce in the European Region and the UK Faculty of Public Health Core Competences, were developed before the emergence of the wellbeing economy and its associated capitals, and primarily focus on public health functions. While both contain competencies related to wellbeing, such as building strategic alliances to improve population health or using public health intelligence to assess wellbeing, neither includes domains specifically dedicated to the wellbeing economy. The new framework is explicitly centered on the four capitals and maps competencies against the four actions of the wellbeing economy agenda, including fair and equitable investment in the capitals, delivery of public health goods and policies for healthy lives, and collaborative work across government and society. The authors also connect the ethics domain to the Inner Development Goals initiative, which promotes inner growth as a prerequisite for sustainable outer change.

The timing is significant. The final report of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All highlighted the urgent need for synergetic, coordinated work across disciplines, sectors and levels of government, leading WHO and its Member States to adopt a Resolution on the Economics of Health for All in 2024. A WHO Global Strategy is being developed for adoption in 2026, and WHO/EURO is progressing the agenda through a Wellbeing Economy Initiative focusing on public health priorities for investment with multiple co-benefits, including ageing well, youth mental health and inclusion, and addressing rural-urban disparities. The review’s limitations are acknowledged: only English-language literature was included, and the framework does not yet prioritize which competencies matter most for each stakeholder group, so the authors recommend complementing it with a consensus study such as expert panels or a Delphi technique. Still, they conclude that the framework is an important step toward defining the field, providing a basis for training, performance assessment, training needs assessment and public health policy development, and serving as an actionable tool showing how public health stakeholders and leaders can best improve the wellbeing of their communities and citizens while building more resilient, sustainable and prosperous economies for all.

Subject of Research: wellbeing economy competency framework in public health

Article Title: Towards a competency framework for wellbeing economy in public health: a scoping review

Article References: Rodríguez-Feria, P., Czabanowska, K., Dyakova, M., Giraldo-Noack, N., & Clemens, T. (2026). Towards a competency framework for wellbeing economy in public health: a scoping review. Public Health Reviews, 47, Article 1609947. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2026.1609947

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/phrs.2026.1609947

Keywords: wellbeing economy, public health, competency framework, scoping review, WHO, OECD, health policy, Towards, competency, framework, wellbeing, economy