What Is the Public Health Workforce?
The public health workforce consists of people with various responsibilities intended to promote healthful conditions. This includes people who work for government agencies officially responsible for public health, community-based organizations promoting health, healthcare system employees in charge of public health in hospitals, and experts from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors supporting public health initiatives.
What Global Challenges Are Affecting Health Worker Effectiveness and Availability?
The effectiveness and availability of health workers are essential to health systems. Their availability, acceptability, quality, and accessibility are critical to expanding health service coverage and realizing the right to the best possible standard of health. The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that by 2030, there will be a substantial shortage of roughly 10 million health workers, mostly in low- and lower-middle-income nations.
However, problems with education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their health staff exist in all nations, regardless of socioeconomic status. Shortages are sustained by ongoing underfunding of health worker education and training, as well as by misaligning policies between employment and educational initiatives concerning the community's health needs. Deploying health staff to remote, underserved, and rural areas also presents challenges. Further aggravating the shortfall could be the growing trend of health personnel migrating abroad, especially to lower- and lower-middle-income nations. One more obstacle to tracking the distribution of health workers in the public sector is inadequate human resources for health information systems.
The public sector's incapacity to employ all available personnel because of financial restrictions impedes universal access to health workers in some nations. As a result, some nations deal with unemployment among health workers and unfulfilled health needs. Furthermore, to support community and health system resilience in the face of diverse disasters, both man-made and natural, the health workforce is essential. Interestingly, women make up 67 percent of the health and social services workforce, which offers a chance to create meaningful work, especially for young people and women.
What Are the Challenges in the Public Health Workforce?
Public health's urgent issues, both now and in the future, highlight how crucial it is to prioritize professional development, sensible hiring procedures, and staff retention plans. A sizable fraction of the public health profession needs more formal training, and many graduates choose careers unrelated to public health. To close this gap, employers must work with educators to provide students with real-world experience and relevant employment prospects. In public health, the discrepancy between training and practice adds uncertainty about career pathways and professional identity.
It is frequently difficult to define the limits of the public health workforce nationally and internationally. Due to its overlap with the healthcare industry and other sectors, it is challenging to determine its size correctly. Despite this, maintaining a core group of acknowledged public health experts is essential to guarantee that public health actions are grounded in research and data.
To handle complicated health concerns and address the underlying causes of health problems, these specialists might broaden their scope of practice and collaborate with other experts, dismantling boundaries across different fields. Some nations, such as Sweden and England, have public health experts overseeing multi-sectoral initiatives. For instance, local administrations' Directors of Public Health in England are responsible for encouraging health improvement. However, in many European nations, public health experts need a clear mandate to spearhead these initiatives inside or across health system sectors.
How Can Collaboration Improve Public Health Workforce Quality?
The framework developed by Lichtveld and Cioffi outlines six critical measures that should be taken to improve the quality of the public health workforce. These include monitoring the workforce, identifying and training skills needed, providing opportunities for lifelong learning, offering incentives to promote skill development, conducting research to identify effective practices, and ensuring adequate funding to support these initiatives.
The demands of a wide range of professionals must be considered to develop the public health workforce. Collaboration between different disciplines and professions is necessary to improve population health. A major obstacle is ensuring everyone in the larger workforce understands their role in public health and gains the skills needed to carry it out efficiently. To enable professionals to participate actively in initiatives to enhance public health, policies should be put in place that formally define and legitimize the public health role within job criteria. Even while the general workforce has specialized knowledge in some areas of public health, it may need access to leadership positions or the authority to do so. Currently, leadership positions in public health are frequently held by doctors who have followed organized career pathways.
The wider public health workforce carries out local implementation of evidence-based interventions under the direction of the core staff. Employers, such as federal agencies and municipal governments, encourage workforce development by offering competitive pay, respectable working conditions, and chances for professional advancement. At the national and international levels, professional associations advocate for the needs of public health professionals. International organizations outline the necessary steps for public health but must specify which nations will provide these services. Certain European nations provide specialized public health training programs to guarantee uniform standards throughout national boundaries.
Conclusion
A well-defined strategy is required for the public health workforce to improve public health policy and promote intersectoral collaboration. There are difficulties in recruiting and retaining this workforce due to the need for clear definitions and legislation across various nations. Ensuring that public health workers have the necessary competencies should be the first step, in addition to efforts to develop leadership abilities. Since the public health workforce is diverse and interdisciplinary, methods for its development must be comprehensive. Public health initiatives will continue to be underfunded and ineffectual without a clear core workforce and suitable frameworks. By becoming more professional, the discipline can gain recognition and become more visible to the public and policymakers, which will help everyone make better health decisions.
