Clarification from the agency

Current, Permanent Employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration

The duties include, but are not limited to:

• Providing oversight and leadership for the analysis; implementation, spread and maintenance of SPP projects and initiatives related to mental health and/or public health and/or suicide prevention.
• Providing teams with the policy, tools, methods and data to improve their processes, organization effectiveness and efficiency.
• Reviewing of a variety of macro and micro systems within outpatient clinics, inpatient clinical services, business and administrative services, and leadership/management services.
• Applying appropriate techniques such as advanced data analysis, modeling and simulation to improve and guide initiatives.
• Leading efforts in the use data/statistics and surveillance efforts to improve quality, safety, effectiveness, and efficiency.
• Using information for developing policy, problem solving, decision making, training and education, and organizational improvement.
• Working with other individuals and services to develop systems for data mining, transforming data into information, knowledge management, and research and evaluation.
• Recommending and developing methods of performance evaluation and process improvement for national and local healthcare systems, networks, VHA, and provides training and consultative services to all levels for healthcare system management regarding the requirements and implications of the SPP initiatives based on program, policy, data analysis and, surveillance.
• Collaborating with SPP management to ensure that improvements to processes are spread to other work units and locations and that these improvements are sustained over time.
• Developing policy, methods for the measurement and assessment of spread and sustainability.
• Working with other individuals and services to develop automated systems for tracking improvement (data trending, data dashboards, and balanced scorecards) and for monitoring project progress and completion (project management, "closing the loop").

Conditions of employment

• You must be a U.S. citizen to apply for this job.
• Selective Service Registration is required for males born after 12/31/1959.
• You may be required to serve a probationary period.
• Designated and/or random drug testing may be required.
• Subject to a background/security investigation.

Qualifications

To qualify for this position, applicants must meet all requirements by the closing date of this announcement, 06/21/2019.

Time-In-Grade Requirement: Applicants who are current, permanent Federal employees and have held a GS grade any time in the past 52 weeks must also meet time-in-grade requirements by the closing date of this announcement. For a GS-13 position you must have served 52 weeks at the GS-12. The grade may have been in any occupation, but must have been held in the Federal service. An SF-50 showing your time-in-grade eligibility must be submitted with your application materials. If the most recent SF-50 has an effective date within the past year, it may not clearly demonstrate you possess one year time-in-grade, as required by the announcement. In this instance, you must provide an additional SF-50 that clearly demonstrates one year time-in-grade.

Award 50's do not provide sufficient information and will not be accepted for the purpose of verifying time-in-grade. Please review the Required Document section for additional information, and to ensure all appropriate documentation is submitted at the time of application.

Time-In-Grade requirements also apply to former Federal employees applying for reinstatement who have separated within the past 52 weeks, and current employees applying under the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998 (VEOA).

Basic Requirements: You must meet one of the following Basic Requirements below to be eligible for the Statistician (Health) - Epidemiologist, GS-1530-13. NOTE: Transcripts (unofficial or official) must be submitted with your application materials. Education cannot be credited without documentation. Experience must be fully documented on your resume and must include job title, duties, month and year start/end dates AND hours worked per week.

Degree: Successful completion of a Bachelor's (or higher) degree that included 15 semester hours in statistics (or in mathematics and statistics, provided at least 6 semester hours were in statistics), and 9 additional semester hours in one or more of the following: physical or biological sciences, medicine, education, or engineering; or in the social sciences including demography, history, economics, social welfare, geography, international relations, social or cultural anthropology, health sociology, political science, public administration, psychology, etc. Credit toward meeting statistical course requirements should be given for courses in which 50 percent of the course content appears to be statistical methods, e.g., courses that included studies in research methods in psychology or economics such as tests and measurements or business cycles, or courses in methods of processing mass statistical data such as tabulating methods or electronic data processing.

OR

Combination of education and experience: courses as shown above, plus appropriate experience or additional education. The experience should have included a full range of professional statistical work such as (a) sampling, (b) collecting, computing, and analyzing statistical data, and (c) applying statistical techniques such as measurement of central tendency, dispersion, skewness, sampling error, simple and multiple correlation, analysis of variance, and tests of significance.

AND

In addition to the Basic Requirements above, to qualify for this position at the GS-13 level, you must meet the following Minimum Qualification Requirements:

Specialized Experience: You must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the next lower grade GS-12 in the normal line of progression for the occupation in the organization. Examples of specialized experience would typically include, but are not limited to:

• Possesses paramount profession knowledge in disease and disabling illness including epidemiological research and public health programs.
• Experience with understanding of the policies, missions, and operations of VHA, data management and surveillance as it relates to public health, the Department of Veterans Affairs and other Federal agencies with whom VA partners in its suicide prevention efforts.
• Experience working with applicable laws, regulations, policies and directives, and how new or revised laws, regulations, policies, and directives impact VA suicide prevention programming and/or Veteran health information management and surveillance
• Experience in public speaking and the ability to present relevant information to a wide range of audiences, including but not limited to Congress, other federal agencies, state and local governments and organizations, and the general public.
• Experience in directing the work of others to fulfill the mission of the VHA in ending Veteran suicide.
• Experience working collaboratively with other disciplines, VA and VHA Senior leadership, senior managers from other Federal, State and local agencies.
• Experience working with agencies outside of VHA that provide or may be able to provide significant resources for Veterans.
• Experience developing and managing data and surveillance strategies for mental health programs.

How you will be evaluated

You will be evaluated for this job based on how well you meet the qualifications above.

In describing your experience, please be clear and specific. We will not make assumptions regarding your experience.

After you have met the minimum qualifications and been referred you will be rated on the following competencies based on your application for this position:

• Data Management
• Decision Making
• Knowledge Management
• Oral and Written Communication
• Planning and Evaluation