Be Prepared for the Unexpected: Public Health Pearls of Wisdom

Public health agencies face a serious workforce crisis: an aging workforce with no sign of backfill, continued employee attrition, and concurrent budget cuts with increasing mandates leaving workers with a “do more with less” mantra. These challenges act synergistically to directly impact the staff's ability to carry out day-to-day activities causing a chronic loss of staff morale, and ultimately a loss of institutional memory. Passing on experiential knowledge and wisdom may be an effective method of empowering health department staff to think creatively, foster collaboration and leadership, and improve the efficiency of day-to-day operations. This research videography project aimed to preserve the institutional memory of, and forever capture, the universal pieces of wisdom of 10 current and former New York metropolitan-area health department employees with over 250 years of combined experience. These video-driven trainings serve to preserve the institutional memory of the health department by leveraging the undocumented knowledge, skills, experience, and expertise. Through an academic partnership, this study was collaboratively designed, implemented, and evaluated. Individual interviews were video-taped and qualitatively analyzed, using grounded theory, to capture emerging themes as a basis for a modular training package. Themes include cross-training, operations in crisis, the unexpected, and optimal communication. This oral history tool was implemented within the health department by a trained in-house facilitator. These public health pearls of wisdom, are applicable to any health department and may offer a unique training tool to enable other health department staff to think and act creatively during a crisis, fiscal or emergent.