Examining Effective Strategies that Local Communities Have Used to Meet Expanded Public Health Workforce Needs

The researchers examined local communities’ effective strategies for meeting expanding public health workforce needs. They studied six of the twelve Community Tracking Study (CTS) communities that have faced particularly unique and/or challenging situations. They also conducted interviews with key public health stakeholders, covering topics such as key local factors that have an impact on the public health workforce, current public health workforce needs and areas of severe shortages, current recruitment and retention challenges and strategies to overcome them, and resource and other needs that might facilitate recruitment and retention. The objective of this project was to better understand how local agencies are dealing with the public health workforce shortages identified in the 2005 CTS site visits.