Your health is in their hands: Findings from the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey

Leaders in the field of public health workforce research have been calling for better data on the public health workforce for decades. There is very little research on the demographic characteristics of the public health workforce, educational qualifications, salaries, job satisfaction, the workplace environment, or individual workers’ perspectives on important topics in public health.

The Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) was undertaken to fill these research gaps by collecting key public health workforce data from individual workers themselves. PH WINS is the first nationally representative survey to collect data from state health agency workers about critical issues in today’s transforming health system such as the diversity of the public health workforce, workers’ ability to meet difficult challenges ahead, worker perspectives on current national trends, and aspects of the workplace environment that are likely to impact worker recruitment, retention, development, and performance. PH WINS had three main goals: inform future workforce development investments, establish a baseline to use to evaluate future workforce development efforts, and to explore workforce attitudes, morale, and climate.

This session will cover the consensus building work undertaken with leaders from across the field of public health before the survey was developed, the methods and results from the survey, as well as the implications and practical ways public health leaders can use the data.