A new article published in Health Promotion Practice describes a unique partnership between the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) and local governmental health departments across the state. In an effort to address the persistent understaffing of local public health departments (LHD), bolster recruitment efforts, and create career pathways for students entering the field, SPH and local health departments piloted a paid internship program that eventually placed 10 master’s in public health (MPH) students in local health departments.

The internship program was jointly developed by SPH’s Center for Public Health Systems (CPHS), and the Local Public Health Association of Minnesota (LPHA). Over the course of their 12-week internships, participants assisted local health departments in a range of high-priority projects that provided them with new skills and exposed them to the kind of real world, hands-on experiences they would encounter as public health professionals.

The Health Promotion Practice article detailed three key lessons learned from the pilot program:

1. The program improved LHD workforce capacity in the short term, and served as an initial step for supporting longer-term capacity building. Evaluations showed that LHD benefitted from the extra staffing in the short term and, by exposing interns to careers in governmental public health, opened the possibility of longer-term careers in the sector.
2. The most successful projects were well-defined, important enough to provide value to the intern, and had clear expectations at the outset. Given the limited timeframe (120 hours total) evaluations showed that clarity of the project from the outset was a priority.
3. For many rural or more distant local health departments, additional recruiting efforts should be prioritized. All participants were based in the Twin Cities, so placements at rural health departments were performed remotely, which did not always fit the needs of the project or the intern. Future recruitment efforts focused on finding students willing to relocate would solve this problem.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and other factors have dramatically reduced the size of the public health workforce, and to ensure even a basic level of services, the governmental public health workforce needs to increase by almost 80 percent,” said Harshada Karnik, a researcher with SPH’s Center for Public Health Systems and lead author of the article. “Given the critical need, and the fact that only about 17 percent of recent public health graduates are working in governmental public health, we have to think creatively about strategies to encourage more students and recent graduates to consider careers in governmental public health. The lessons we learned from this pilot program are a small step toward building the bridges we need between recent graduates and local public health departments. We look forward to working with LPHA and local health officials to deepen these relationships in the future.”