The Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) in Illinois is contracting with CPHS to conduct a cost and capacity assessment of their agency. The project will review the staffing and financial allocations of CCDPH and estimate the resources the agency requires to fully implement foundational public health services in their jurisdiction. Additionally, we will also conduct an assessment of the external and internal factors related to workforce recruitment and retention.

The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) is contracting with CPHS to support the transformation of the Minnesota public health system; this project aligns with other initiatives across the nation referred to as “21st Century Public Health” or “21C.” CPHS staff have used Minnesota practitioner-vetted definitions for the various scopes of work and activities across the state to design and deploy an assessment tool to estimate staffing and spending for Minnesota public health. In addition to a CPHS-conducted public health system network analysis, these data will support the development of models for current staffing and spending and potential scenarios for future transformations. Findings anticipated to be available in Spring 2023.

Due to public health workforce recruitment and retention challenges that have accelerated during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and AmeriCorps are providing $400 million to create a new public health workforce pipeline. CPHS has partnered with Minnesota Local Public Health Association (LPHA) and ServeMinnesota to establish the Minnesota Public Health Corps (MNPHC) using these funds. CPHS staff assisted with the development of MNPHC using formative evaluation with LPHA members to inform the program (please read our final report on this formative evaluation).

The first set of members were brought on in August, 2022 (please read our blog post describing the launch). CPHS staff are currently assisting with implementation and program evaluation.

The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) is contracting with CPHS to develop a new local health official training similar to the previous Survive and Thrive training. To inform this new local health official training program, CPHS staff conducted key informant interviews, a national survey, an environmental scan, and secondary data analysis. CPHS staff are now working to develop an evaluation for the new program.

TRaining in Informatics for Underrepresented Minorities in Public Health (TRIUMPH) is a consortium housed in the Center and co-led by the School of Nursing to train students and public health workers in public health informatics. TRIUMPH, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, focuses on training people historically underrepresented in the field of public health.

View additional information on TRIUMPH

The Region V Public Health Training Center (RVPHTC) is part of the national Public Health Learning Network, a consortium of ten regional Public Health Training Centers and the country’s most comprehensive resource for public health workforce development. As the Evaluation lead for RVPHTC, we are tasked with evaluating both the programs and training offered by RVPHTC as well as the impact of RVPHTC on program participants, their agencies, and the health outcomes of the communities they serve.

The goal of the project is to increase local health departments’ capacity to define, measure, and track progress toward health equity as a part of their performance evaluation. Final products will include a toolkit of health equity performance practices usable by health departments.

The goal of the project is to support local health departments in creating sustainable recruitment and retention strategies to hire community health workers (CHWs) who have lived experiences in and connections to diverse communities, including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and disabled people. Final products will include a toolkit that health departments can use to recruit and retain CHW positions.

The goal of this project is to review news articles to document public officials’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate causes of stress for public health staff. Final products will include a manuscript that will review public health staff’s experiences and how these impacts could affect the governmental public health workforce well beyond the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

CWORPH is counting the number of public health workers across the country, the first endeavor of its kind since 2014. This project will provide baseline numbers that will be compared to a second enumeration five years in the future. Comparing these counts will determine the success of funding from the Public Health Infrastructure Grant in staffing up the discipline.

CWORPH is partnering with PHAB to create a centralized database for public health agencies to find workforce data. Dubbed Public Health: Leveraging Infrastructure For Transformation, the PH-LIFT endeavor will be an interactive dashboard including data from NACCHO and PHAB, with other data owners set to join in the future.

CPHS is overseeing the modification of the Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) Capacity and Costing Tool to accommodate Missouri’s public health services framework, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ annual financial form, supplementary labor entry tabs, and related enhancements.

CPHS is looking at the student loan debt associated with several degree programs and associated public sector jobs for MissionSquare Retirement. The final report will be published by MissionSquare.

Through this project CPHS developed a cost and capacity tool in Microsoft Excel based on the Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) to be used by health departments across the United States to assess the costs and capacities associated with their agencies’ deliverance of FPHS.

CPHS investigated sources of revenue to create indices for diversification of revenues within local health departments using data submitted to the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO) Profile studies and informal discussions with local public health staff. Products included data and a white paper.

We developed a comprehensive guide that will enables practitioners, students, and Minnesota Public Health Corps members to participate in a community health assessment process, even if they are new to CHNAs.  In addition to providing readers with a detailed process of what a community health assessment entails, this guidance also provides a basic introduction to both qualitative and quantitative tools and resources to assist organizations or agencies in need of assistance with their community health needs assessments. Please contact us if you are interested in this tool.

The National Environmental Health Association (NEHA) contracted with the CPHS to characterize the environmental public health workforce and develop a staffing model for the EPH departments of local health agencies.

We are partnering with the Local Public Health Association of Minnesota (LPHA) to identify occupations and positions that members of LPHA find difficult to recruit candidates for, characterize the challenges to recruitment and retention, and pilot a hub-and-spoke placement model to place students from the school’s public health programs into local health agencies. Please see our first published article with select results from this project.

Public Health Ride-Alongs, modeled on public safety and law enforcement ride-alongs, offer “civilians” the opportunity to learn about the important role that their local public health authority plays in keeping them and their communities healthy and safe. Public health has been called “invisible” because its work is done behind the scenes. Community members may take public health’s accomplishments—safe food, safe water, prevention of disease through immunization and nutrition, among many others—for granted.

This toolkit provides guidelines and templates for a local or state health jurisdiction to develop its own ride-along programs.

This project was an initiative of the Region V Public Health Training Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and CPHS. Together, we created evidence-based job descriptions and attractive job postings that can be easily adapted by local and state health departments.