Abstract
Major initiatives to improve the public health workforce since 1997 have been driven by a hundred-fold increase in federal financial support, technologies providing greater access to public health workers, and an emerging national priority to prepare for and respond to bioterrorism and other urgent threats. This report examines the status of the national public health workforce development agenda, including its major strategies and emphases, and offers a roadmap for assessing, enhancing, and recognizing competent performance through comprehensive public health workforce preparedness management systems.
The preparedness of the public health workforce to address bioterrorism and other emergent threats was thrust into the national spotlight by the events of September and October 2001. 1 The often-cited Institute of Medicine's 1988 report, The Future of Public Health, 2 stimulated modest interest in issues related to public health workforce development. However, meaningful initiatives to improve public health workforce preparedness have appeared only since 1997, driven by a hundredfold increase in federal financial support, technologies providing greater access to public health workers, and an emerging national priority to prepare for and respond to bioterrorism and other urgent threats. 3 As consistently documented since 1990, including in two recent Institute of Medicine reports, these developments were layered over existing but largely uncoordinated approaches to identifying and addressing the needs of the public health workforce. 4-8 The result has been a flurry of activity moving in unclear directions. This work examines the current status of the national public health workforce development agenda, including its major strategies and emphases, and offers a roadmap for enhancing public health workforce preparedness.