Current Activities

The CDC funded the Council on Linkages to survey a large proportion of public health professionals (nearly 100,000 individuals). The survey asks current and former governmental public health workers about how, when, and why they entered, have remained in, and/or left the governmental public health workforce.

The main focus of the survey is on governmental public health because that is where is public health worker shortages are most critical. Survey results will be used by the Council on Linkages to develop evidence-based recruitment and retention strategies for the US public health system! The survey was fielded to public health professionals that are registered users of TRAIN, the public health learning management system developed by PHF.

Why this Survey is Important:

As noted by one of the nation's leading public health workforce research experts, Kristine Gebbie, DrPH, RN:

"This [the TRAIN population] is a sample of public health workers with evidence of interest in professional development/advancement. The degree to which they are representative of all public health workers can be estimated following the survey by comparison to the NACCHO and other data sets. There is no data set that tracks career progression for the public health workforce in any jurisdiction; the data from this survey will provide a beginning understanding of career paths, and inform future, more representative studies, or the incorporation of career progression questions into other surveys."

Want to view a draft of the survey? Click here.

Background

The Council on Linkages charged the Pipeline Workgroup with finding data to inform the development of evidence-based recruitment and retention strategies. Available qualitative data were used to map the basic public health pipeline and learn where the largest gaps exist. Click here to view the information that was collected about the number of public health workers.

Policy Statement

After an extensive literature review, the Council on Linkages concluded in May 2008 that the necessary qualitative data were significantly lacking. However, it maintained that the collection of these data was an essential first step to developing effective policies and programs for ensuring a well trained and adequately sized governmental public health workforce.

As such, the Council on Linkages released a policy statement to convey to policy makers/funders and potential data collectors the importance of gathering quantitative data on the workforce flow into and out of governmental public health agencies.

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

Friday, September 11, 2009 from 2:00pm - 3:00pm ET. See the agenda.

Friday, March 27, 2009 from 1:00pm - 2:30pm ET. See the agenda and minutes.

Thursday, May 8, 2008 from 2:00pm - 3:30pm ET. See the agenda and minutes.

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

Thursday, February 28, 2008 from 2:00pm - 3:00pm ET. See the agenda and minutes.

Wednesday, November 16, 2007 from 3:30pm - 4:30pm 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