<p>The backbone of the nation’s public health workforce is buckling.</p><p>A recent study has raised alarms with its dire prediction of a mass exodus of governmental public health workers—considered the “backbone” of public health efforts in the United States—if current trends hold.<span><sup>1</sup></span> “In our analytic sample, nearly half of all employees in state and local public health agencies left between 2017 and 2021, a proportion that rose to three-quarters for those ages 35 and younger or with shorter tenures,” the study’s authors wrote. “If separation trends continue, by 2025 this would represent more than 100,000 staff leaving their organizations, or as much as half of the governmental public health workforce in total.”</p><p>Based on data from the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Surveys in 2017 and 2021, the study has raised troubling questions about the country’s health priorities and the ability of local and state governments to recruit and retain new talent to help fill a yawning gap. “If you saw half or three quarters of firefighters or police indicating that they were planning to quit, much less retire, I think that would be pretty concerning. That’s kind of where we are right now in public health,” says lead author Jonathon Leider, PhD, an associate professor of public health and the director of the Center for Public Health Systems at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.</p><p>Many of the public health jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008–2009 never returned and left governments with a workforce deficit, Dr Leider says. Then, older employees who had delayed retirement during the recession started to leave during the economic recovery. Their departure was compounded by what some demographers have dubbed the “silver tsunami,” or the wave of baby boomers reaching retirement age.</p><p>“We’ve been investing in this short-age for a long time,” adds study coauthor Brian Castrucci, DrPH, MA, president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland, which focuses on improving community health and public health systems. By the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he notes, a lack of attention to filling the available positions and increasing low pay rates had already contributed to a shortage of 80,000 full-time equivalents.</p><p>The pandemic then led to “unprecedented levels of bullying, politicization, and political attacks on the public health workforce,” he charges. Amid that hostile environment, employees were pulled from other health department divisions to bolster short-staffed pandemic response teams, which added to the stress. “This is just a recipe for burnout,” he says. “The pandemic was an accelerant, but the fire was already burning.”</p><p>Emily Burke, EdD, MPH, senior director of workforce development and applied practice at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health in Washington, DC, says that a continuation of the alarming exodus could have major
然而,最大的首要问题或许是莱德博士和其他公共卫生专家所说的美国 "恐慌、忽视、重复 "的资金循环。"在美国,我们现在处于这样一种状况:当房子已经着火时,我们基本上就成了消防员,他们得到了资助,然后又被要求去买消防车、去建立基础设施、去购买和连接水泵来灭火。"2023年,联邦政府开始通过疾病控制和预防中心(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)发放32亿美元--一种名为公共卫生基础设施补助金的注入资金,以帮助支撑全国各地枯竭的公共卫生工作队伍。然而,Castrucci 博士指出,这笔拨款几乎没有关于如何使用的规定;拨款决定主要由各州的民选领导人和卫生官员做出。在佛罗里达州,该州的外科医生约瑟夫-A-拉达波(Joseph A. Ladapo)多次抨击疫苗,并在最近呼吁停止使用信使 RNA 疫苗来预防 SARS-CoV2 病毒,因为他声称这种疫苗存在危险的 DNA 污染。公共卫生专家普遍驳斥这种说法是 "科学无稽之谈 "2。莱德博士对公共卫生政策上日益严重的党派和意识形态分歧表示遗憾,这种分歧导致了曾经被视为相对无争议的决定和法令的反弹。关于疫苗和 COVID-19 的大量错误信息和虚假信息只会加剧公众的不信任和对政府越权的看法。他说,要重建这种信任,可能需要说服更多的民选官员宣传公共卫生在保护社区方面的价值。他和其他专家一致认为,公共卫生官员本身也可以做得更好,与他们的选民进行更直接的沟通。"很多时候,公共卫生是非常沉默的,"本杰明博士说,他引用了一个常见的笑话:当卫生官员做他们最好的工作时,什么也不会发生。"他说:"然而,每天都有安全的水可以饮用,安全的空气可以呼吸,安全的食物可以食用,而我的同事们却没有因为他们为确保这一切的发生所做的工作而获得赞誉。预防癌症也是如此。卡斯特鲁奇博士建议,有必要对公共卫生战略进行重大的重新设计。"他说:"这个国家每个角落每个县的每个人都能从公共卫生中受益,但我们从来没有这样推销过。"我们从未将公共卫生作为一项经济指标来推销。为了改变目前的发展轨迹,他同意联邦政府应该为进入公共卫生队伍的学生提供贷款偿还资金。卡斯特鲁奇博士警告说,如果不纠正方向,从可预防的癌症到未来的大流行病,美国可能会面临更多自作自受的痛苦。"他断言:"今天,我们比 COVID-19 开始时还要脆弱。"我们经历了一百年来最严重的大流行病,但我们也因此变得更加虚弱:公共卫生人员减少,公众对我们的尊重降低,错误信息增多。这对下一轮大流行来说是致命的组合"。
{"title":"Growing threats of a mass exodus in governmental public health","authors":"Bryn Nelson PhD, William Faquin MD, PhD","doi":"10.1002/cncy.22804","DOIUrl":"10.1002/cncy.22804","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The backbone of the nation’s public health workforce is buckling.</p><p>A recent study has raised alarms with its dire prediction of a mass exodus of governmental public health workers—considered the “backbone” of public health efforts in the United States—if current trends hold.<span><sup>1</sup></span> “In our analytic sample, nearly half of all employees in state and local public health agencies left between 2017 and 2021, a proportion that rose to three-quarters for those ages 35 and younger or with shorter tenures,” the study’s authors wrote. “If separation trends continue, by 2025 this would represent more than 100,000 staff leaving their organizations, or as much as half of the governmental public health workforce in total.”</p><p>Based on data from the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Surveys in 2017 and 2021, the study has raised troubling questions about the country’s health priorities and the ability of local and state governments to recruit and retain new talent to help fill a yawning gap. “If you saw half or three quarters of firefighters or police indicating that they were planning to quit, much less retire, I think that would be pretty concerning. That’s kind of where we are right now in public health,” says lead author Jonathon Leider, PhD, an associate professor of public health and the director of the Center for Public Health Systems at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.</p><p>Many of the public health jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008–2009 never returned and left governments with a workforce deficit, Dr Leider says. Then, older employees who had delayed retirement during the recession started to leave during the economic recovery. Their departure was compounded by what some demographers have dubbed the “silver tsunami,” or the wave of baby boomers reaching retirement age.</p><p>“We’ve been investing in this short-age for a long time,” adds study coauthor Brian Castrucci, DrPH, MA, president and chief executive officer of the de Beaumont Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland, which focuses on improving community health and public health systems. By the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he notes, a lack of attention to filling the available positions and increasing low pay rates had already contributed to a shortage of 80,000 full-time equivalents.</p><p>The pandemic then led to “unprecedented levels of bullying, politicization, and political attacks on the public health workforce,” he charges. Amid that hostile environment, employees were pulled from other health department divisions to bolster short-staffed pandemic response teams, which added to the stress. “This is just a recipe for burnout,” he says. “The pandemic was an accelerant, but the fire was already burning.”</p><p>Emily Burke, EdD, MPH, senior director of workforce development and applied practice at the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health in Washington, DC, says that a continuation of the alarming exodus could have major ","PeriodicalId":9410,"journal":{"name":"Cancer Cytopathology","volume":"132 3","pages":"134-135"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cncy.22804","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140048806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}