Actionable companion · School leadership and instructional improvement

From leadership research to district action: Entrepreneurial training in public health postgraduate programs: a systematic review of educational approaches

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: systematic-review. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

The public health sector is undergoing sustained change, shaped by complex health challenges, constrained resources, and evolving employment conditions that may affect the availability of stable and fulfilling career pathways for public health professionals. Within this context, the integration of entrepreneurial competencies into public health training has been proposed as one potential strategy to support innovation, workforce adaptability, and career diversification. This systematic review examined the reported landscape of entrepreneurial training within postgraduate public health programs and described the educational approaches through which such training is delivered. A comprehensive literature search was conducted across eight databases (PubMed, Scopus, ProQuest Central, Cochrane, EBSCO Medline Ultimate, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, and Semantic Scholar) for studies published between 2000 and May 2025. A complementary targeted scan of publicly available Master of Public Health (MPH) and related programs (13–15 August 2025) identified universities explicitly referencing entrepreneurship-related training. Three peer‑reviewed studies met the inclusion criteria, indicating a small and heterogeneous body of empirical work on public health entrepreneurship (PHE) education at the postgraduate level. Across included studies, PHE was inconsistently defined and most often positioned as an elective rather than a core curriculum component. Educational approaches primarily used experiential, team‑based, and mentor‑supported formats and addressed a broad, but not consistently specified, set of competencies, including innovation and opportunity recognition, networking, communication and stakeholder engagement, management and leadership, and basic legal, marketing, and financial knowledge. Outcomes were largely limited to short‑term, self‑reported perceptions, with little evidence on long‑term skill acquisition, career pathways, or workforce‑level effects. Reported constraints included limited faculty expertise and mentorship capacity, restricted institutional resources, and uneven access to entrepreneurship‑supportive ecosystems. Current evidence suggests that postgraduate PHE training is emerging but remains sparsely documented and weakly evaluated. Further research is needed to develop shared competency frameworks, apply more rigorous and longitudinal evaluation designs, and investigate scalable delivery models, including digital and AI‑enabled approaches, with particular attention to equity in access to entrepreneurship training within public health education.

A 90-day district inquiry

1. Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
2. Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
3. Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
4. Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Nazik M. Nurelhuda; Fadumo Noor; Moetaz El Sergany; Zufishan Alam; Zafar Imam Khan; Sanjai Parahoo. Entrepreneurial training in public health postgraduate programs: a systematic review of educational approaches. Frontiers in Public Health (2026-06-23). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1747628

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.