The Consortium for Workforce Research in Public Health (CWORPH), led by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH), has been awarded $4.2 million to evaluate the nation’s public health workforce and public health data systems over the next five years. The funding for this evaluation was awarded to SPH by the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB). As the sole national accrediting body for public health in the U.S., PHAB supports health departments to improve quality, accountability, and performance.

PHAB is one of three national partners, alongside the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI), who received a total of $155 million in grant funding from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) as part of an unprecedented $3.84 billion federal Public Health Infrastructure Grant Program (PHIG), aimed at helping public health departments across the United States strengthen their workforce and infrastructure. PHIG funding also gives awards directly to state, local, and territorial health departments to provide the people, services, and systems needed to bolster public health agencies and departments across the country, many of which were severely impacted by the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

The evaluation will be conducted by SPH’s Center for Public Health Systems and CWORPH, a research collaboration of six universities led by the U of M. SPH researchers will focus on two principal tasks:

• Conducting an analysis to determine the current size, distribution, and characteristics of the nation’s public health workforce;
• Supporting the creation of a first-in-the nation data platform under leadership of the Public Health Accreditation Board to make sure that the nation’s public health-related datasets are aligned and able to communicate. The platform, named PH-LIFT, will present stories about infrastructure and relevant data, as well as allow health departments to benchmark and access related resources.

“The last time the U.S. counted our public health workforce was in 2014, so before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, we more or less had to guess the number of people who worked in health departments across the U.S.,” says JP Leider, director of the SPH Center for Public Health Systems. “The U.S. government counts how many folks work in doctors offices or dentists offices each year, but it doesn’t regularly count how many people work in health departments.”

“Funding at this level targeted to the public health workforce has never happened before,” says Janette Dill, SPH associate professor and deputy director of CWORPH. “This infusion of $3 billion is a unique opportunity to plug some of the gaps in the nation’s public health workforce that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. My hope is that this is the first in a series of sustained investments for the public health workforce here in Minnesota and across the country.”

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This work is supported by funds made available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), National Center for STLT Public Health Infrastructure and Workforce, through OE22-2203: Strengthening U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Workforce, and Data Systems grant. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government.