Diagnosing the learning culture in public health agencies.

This paper reports data from a research and training project in one mid-western state in the United States to identify the organizations' capacity to learn and to change to meet current public health demands. The Dimensions of a Learning Organization (DLOQ) survey was used as a diagnostic tool in four local public health departments in order to identify the organizations' capacity to learn and to change to meet current public health demands. Comparisons between the results from this study and those from other studies of the learning organization indicate a number of differences with implications for creating a learning culture in a public health setting. Similar to previous research using the DLOQ, this study found that organizational variables were more strongly related to performance than were individual and team learning dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]