The Public Health Workforce

Headnote

Key Words staffing, competencies, professional education, workforce research

Abstract The development of a fully-competent public health workforce as a key component of the nation's public health infrastructure has become the focus of increasing attention. The subject is included in one, and is the major topic of a second, report from the Institute of Medicine published late in 2002. Workforce issues have stimulated the convening of the majority of public health-related associations in a range of collaborations on the subjects of defining, enumerating, credentialing, educating, and studying the workforce. The authors review the major questions confronting the field and introduce key components of current thinking about approaches to improvement.

INTRODUCTION

The public health workforce broadly defined includes all those engaged during a significant part of the time in work that creates the conditions within which people can be healthy. More specifically, the workforce is composed of those who work for official public health agencies at all levels of government, community-based, and voluntary organizations with a health promotion focus, the public health-related staff of hospitals and health care systems, and a range of others in private industry, government, and the voluntary sector. This workforce includes nurses, sanitarians, educators, administrators, physicians, nutritionists, social workers, engineers, and many other professionals, a large group of persons working in the field as aides, extenders, community health workers, and, of course, vital administrative, support, and clerical staff and a remarkable complement of volunteers. Their training, preparation, and continuing education needs are wide and varied, as are the human resources systems in which they work.

The complexities of workforce issues in public health today could fill several monographs, and the efforts to address the challenges in this field are extensive and impressive enough to fill several more. Public health workforce is a subject particularly worthy of inclusion in this volume of the Annual Review of Public Health because of the attention it has received in the past year, and because of the importance of a well-developed workforce to achieving all of the goals of public health. The myriad continuing challenges facing public health require us to continue to attend to professional education, recruitment and retention of staff, investment in continuing education, and more.

Notable challenges to the field include:

* defining...