High turnover rates in the public health workforce pose ongoing challenges to maintain essential services and institutional knowledge. Recent studies indicate that job dissatisfaction, burnout, and structural barriers have intensified following the COVID-19 pandemic. While prior studies have identified key predictors of turnover intention, the potential of machine learning to improve predictive accuracy and guide…
The governmental public health workforce, especially in state and local health departments, is significantly short-staffed, and labor market competition for public health graduates and others with high-demand skills can make recruitment and retention challenging. While some research shows that public health workers generally earn less than those in similar jobs in other sectors, federal data…
The size of the US public health workforce has markedly declined in recent years, a trend exacerbated by economic instability and an aging demographic. There was a temporary surge in staffing through emergency hires during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the permanence of these positions remains uncertain. Concurrently, public health degree conferrals have sharply increased, creating…
The public health workforce is in a critical state, with the current supply being unsustainable at best and dire at worst. Based on data from 2017 and 2019, health departments needed to hire 80,000 full-time employees to provide basic public health foundational services even before the onset of COVID-19. The situation has likely worsened due…
