Diane Spokus
The Pennsylvania State University HPA Associate Director of UG Professional Development, Associate Teaching Professor
University Park, PA 16803
Diane Spokus, Ph.D., M.Ed., MCHES®, CDP, is a Teaching Professor and Associate Director of Health Policy and Administration (HPA) UG Professional Development in the College of Health and Human Development at Penn State University Park campus. Currently, Dr. Spokus has 20 years of teaching experience. She co-supervised the summer HPA Administrative Internship program for 10 years. In addition, Dr. Spokus also teaches Human Resource Management in Healthcare (HPA 460). Dr. Spokus also teaches the HPA 301W Health Policy course and has first-hand policy experience having worked in the State House of Representatives and also for the PA Department of Public Welfare. Prior to her health policy appointment, Dr. Spokus taught Biobehavioral Health and Aging courses. While working in the College of Medicine at Hershey, she also worked as a diabetes health educator on community-based health education programs while coordinating continuing education programs for clinicians. She was also a Research Associate at the Penn State School of Nursing coordinating a Hartford Foundation Nursing project. Previously, she worked on various workforce education research projects funded through the PA Department of Labor and Industry. Dr. Spokus also worked on the multi-site ACTIVE Research cognitive intervention study. Her areas of research interest are human resource management, healthcare worker retention, recruitment, training, job satisfaction, and quality of work life. Dr. Spokus is a 2014 Schreyers Institute of Teaching Excellence grant recipient.
Dr. Spokus also has her Personal Home Care Certificate from the PA Department of Public Welfare and was awarded the Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES) credential in 2011. Until the recent Geisinger-Lewistown merger, she was the Vice-Chair of the Lewistown Hospital Board of Directors, Chair of the Lewistown Hospital Foundation (LHF) Executive Board, Chair of the Lewistown Hospital Professional Affairs Committee, and Chair of the Nominating Committee. Presently, she holds the same position on the Community Advisory Board. Dr. Spokus is also an elected member of the Pennsylvania Rural Health Association Board of Directors and a member of the Nominating and Strategic Planning sub-committees. She has also served twelve years as a member of the Southcentral Allied Health Care Steering Committee of the Workforce Investment Board examining the critical workforce shortage areas in healthcare.
Dr. Spokus was an appointed member of the past Penn State Commission for Women’s Executive Board. She is a member of the following professional associations: the Society for Human Resource Development (SHRM), the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE), the National Certified Health Educators (NCHES), the Centre County Geriatric Interest Network, the Gerontological Society of America (GSA), the National Council on Aging, (NCOA) the American Society on Aging (ASA), and the Centre County Geriatric Interest Network. She was also a member of Juniper Village at Brookline’s Advisory Board and a 15-year member of the State College Area School District Clinical Health program. Dr. Spokus has reviewed manuscripts, contributed to several book chapters, and is the co-author of the book entitled, Working Longer: New Strategies for Managing, Training, and Recruiting Older Employees. As an Allied Healthcare Advisory Board member, she has also co-authored the Healthcare Employer Toolkit: A Guide to Recruiting and Retaining Older Healthcare Workers for the PA Department of Aging and the Southcentral Workforce Investment Board. Her last chapter publication is Training Older Workers: Pathways and Pitfalls for Older Workers, published by Springer Publishing. She presently co-authored a publication that was published in the Journal of International Healthcare Management entitled, Trends in Utilization of Off-Pump Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery in the US.