Workgroup Background Information

In an attempt to strengthen the public health workforce, both in numbers and in quality, the Council set out to map the pipeline for public health professionals, charting how, when, and why people enter and leave governmental public health agencies. In its initial efforts to map the pipeline, the Council collected information on the number of public health workers. Current activities include developing a survey for governmental public health workers; data obtained from the survey will be used by the Council to create evidence-based recruitment and retention strategies for this workforce.

Policy Statement
After an extensive literature review, the Council concluded in May 2008 that the necessary data are significantly lacking. The Council, however, maintains that the collection of this type of data is an essential first step to developing effective polices and programs for ensuring a well trained and adequately sized governmental public health workforce.

As such, the Council has released a policy statement to convey to policy makers/funders and potential data collectors the importance of gathering data on the workforce flow into and out of governmental public health agencies. The Council hopes that the policy statement will lead potential collectors of data (on both the practice and academic sides of public health) to request funding and potential funders to be receptive to these requests.

Conference call meetings (all agendas and minutes are PDFs):

Friday, March 27, 2009 from 1-2:30 p.m. ET. See the agenda and minutes.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 from 2-3:30 p.m. ET. See the agenda and minutes.

Monday, April 14, 2008 from 2-3:00 p.m. ET. See the agenda and minutes.

Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. ET. See the agenda and the minutes.

Wednesday, November 16, 2007 at 3:30 p.m. ET. See the agenda and the minutes.

For further information on the workgroup:
Background Paper (PDF)
List of Workgroup Members

If you would like additional information on the workgroup, please contact Pamela Saungweme at psaungweme@phf.org or 202-218-4424