Promoting a Powerful Public Health Workforce: A Call for Action

The Institute of Medicine in their sentinel report “Who will keep the Public Healthy” (2003) validates and places at the forefront the importance of developing a skilled public health workforce. The public health workforce is defined as those people who provide essential public health services, regardless of the specific nature of their place of employment (Beck & Boulton, 2012).   The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASSPH), and the Council on Education in Public Health(CEPH) validate the importance of accredited Schools and Programs of Public Health training a competent public health workforce to meet goals of  adding more than 250,000 additional public health workers by the year 2020 (Hilliard & Boulton, 2012). Central to this is identifying the community needs and strategically planning an inclusive response. In 2014, a focused survey was developed to assess the needs of the workforce.  The sample consisted of 300 plus practicum site supervisors from a wide range of national and international sites. Participants were surveyed in order to assess where they worked, the type of positions held, their level of interest in public health programs including global health, childrens environmental health, health informatics, emergency preparedness, industrial hygiene, health education and children with special healthcare needs.  The value of professional skills was ranked as well as the optimal mode of delivery for education of the public health workforce. A guiding framework and synthesis of the public health workforce needs will be discussed and evaluated to enable participants to critically think and apply the information to their practice setting.