Conducting a Comprehensive Assessment of the Public Health Workforce: Lessons Learned and Opportunities for the Future

Indiana was one of the earliest states to conduct a comprehensive public health workforce assessment in preparation for the use of federal funds for infrastructure strengthening. Experiences from this assessment provide insights that may be useful to other public health agencies and partners. This brief summarizes key lessons and highlights opportunities for improved workforce assessments. For example, the lack of standardized job titles within local health departments (LHDs) can be mitigated by collecting the top 3 job tasks employees engage in daily and reassigning standardized titles based on nationally collected workforce data. This facilitates comparisons across LHD employees nationally. In addition, many employees felt their job tasks did not align well with the Foundational Public Health Services (FPHS) areas and capabilities, which contributed to the likely overestimation of effort. Further consideration of how to better align and/or integrate FPHS assessment within current practice is needed in addition to improved ways of assessing efforts toward FPHS.