In the spring of 2021, as the United States grappled with a global pandemic, the University of Minnesota School of Public Health responded to the crisis with a multifaceted approach—combining real-time data modeling to guide state decisions, strengthening partnerships with public health agencies, researching the pandemic’s broader social impacts, and integrating those lessons into training for the next generation of public health leaders. The school also established the Center for Public Health Systems (CPHS) to help strengthen long-term preparedness and provide direct support and information on the public health workforce.

“The pandemic was the issue that made it clear that SPH could better serve the public health community by having a Center like this,” said Associate Professor JP Leider, founder and director of CPHS. Almost immediately, the Center’s work began ramping up, and its influence soon extended across the country.  “We were able to kick-start from a Center of none to a Center of 10 within a year,” Leider recalled.

That growth soon led to two major early milestones for CPHS. First, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Health Resources and Services Administration tapped CPHS to lead the nation’s first federally funded Public Health Workforce Research Center, responsible for looking at ways to improve recruitment, retention, and training of the public health workforce. It did so in concert with five other university partners and ten public health practice organizations through the establishment of the Consortium for Workforce Research in Public Health. Each year, HRSA and CDC fund 8-10 public health workforce projects, with ideas submitted by and selected in concert with the practice community. In addition to advancing the field through rigorous research, the Center also conducted a number of early technical assistance and direct support projects during the pandemic. “These early projects put us on that national stage,” said CPHS Manager Rachel Schulman.

Building national impact through partnerships

A defining feature of CPHS over its first five years is its collaborative model. “The Center really has risen on the strength of our staff, our partners, and our affiliated faculty,” Leider said. “It’s not just that we wouldn’t be where we are without partnerships—we just would not be without them.

“The key to our success is that we have really excellent interdisciplinary staff that can do all sorts of things, and then we essentially pair that in a partnership model.” Leider said. “A staff of seven or ten is big, but not quite big enough to do the kinds of projects that we want to do. So we have a number of partners across the country that lets us do things at scale, and makes our work better and more impactful.”

Demonstrating those strengths, and its collaborative approach, CPHS embarked on one of its most ambitious efforts to date: conducting a full accounting of the U.S. public health workforce. Strangely enough, while the federal government tracks employment data on nearly every health sciences profession, it has never developed a system for counting the public health workforce. “One of the curiosities of public health is that we generally don’t know how many people work in our field,” Leider said. That gap became especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, when public health workers were on the front lines, but basic workforce data did not exist. To fill it, CPHS and its partners stitched together multiple national datasets to estimate who makes up the workforce and what roles they serve. The information was a wake-up call, showing that the nation’s workforce is woefully short of levels needed to provide even basic levels of service.

Local Impact 

While CPHS has achieved national recognition, its work remains deeply rooted in Minnesota, home to one of the country’s strongest public health systems. In addition to the highly respected Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), state residents benefit from a network of 74 local public health departments and a central system of communicating public health issues to state leaders. “When I lived in Maryland, I can’t tell you how many times I heard about the ‘Minnesota Model,’” Leider recalled. “People talked about the Minnesota model for performance management, quality improvement, or infectious disease control.”

During the pandemic, CPHS staff led by Researcher Jason Orr worked with MDH and all local health departments to continually assess system needs and identify gaps between available resources and community demands. Orr said the effort, referred to as “21st Century Public Health” analyzed staffing, spending, and system capacity across Minnesota’s public health infrastructure. “Minnesota already had a robust process to obtain data on human and financial resources dedicated to public health by community health boards and MDH,” Orr said. “Our Center had the opportunity to assist with defining state and local responsibilities for those services and identifying gaps in implementation.”

CPHS also played a major role in the Minnesota Public Health Corps, which helped to train and place hundreds of public health workers across the state. Those efforts have not gone unnoticed. In 2022, Minnesota’s Local Public Health Association recognized CPHS with its Partnership Award, honoring the Center for “going above and beyond to elevate the workforce-related challenges faced by local public health.”

Training the next generation of researchers

In addition to its research and policy work, the Center has also become an important training ground for the next generation of public health systems researchers. By providing early-career research staff with real-world projects and having them work alongside national partners, the Center gives researchers the opportunity to make an impact in academic research and public health practice.

“As an early career researcher, my work at the Center has accelerated my growth by allowing me to apply my technical skills to a wide range of workforce content areas,” said researcher Gabriela Lazalde. “It’s helped me further understand the breadth of the public health workforce and the value of bridging gaps between academic research and public health practice.” She added that working with a wide range of partners has shown her “how my work can help break down those siloes through better communication and creating useful tools in close partnership with clients.”

For researcher Nichole Fusilier, the Center has also provided an opportunity to build on firsthand experience in the field. “Having worked in the public health workforce, transitioning into public health systems research felt like a natural progression in my career,” Fusilier said. “Through my work at the Center I have the chance to advance policies that support my colleagues and communities at a broader level.”

Looking ahead

As CPHS enters its next phase, Schulman says the Center will focus on building on the foundation established over the past five years. “We spent the first five years rising to the national level and becoming leaders in this space,” Schulman said.

Moving ahead, the goal is to deepen that impact: “In the next five years, I hope we can do more with that position. By conducting research and doing work that benefits health departments and practitioners directly, we can support them during difficult times and continue to influence national policy in ways that also support the public health system itself.”