Bolstering Public Health at the State Level
From expanding the nation’s public health workforce, to supporting state efforts to reach key health performance indicators, the CDC Foundation is working across the United States to transform public health for better protecting the health of everyone. Through this work, the CDC Foundation is supporting public health jurisdictional leaders as they work to strengthen public health capabilities for the communities they serve.
After a legislative session in 2023 led to significant increases in state funding for local public health, the Indiana Department of Health (IDOH) partnered with the CDC Foundation to help ensure every state resident had access to core health services.
“Through the historic work of the Governor’s Public Health Commission, we wanted to look at the challenges of public health holistically and to modernize public health in Indiana,” said Shane Hatchett, then-IDOH deputy health commissioner and chief of staff.
The CDC Foundation worked with Indiana’s Department of Health to help the state’s local health departments brainstorm solutions, build community connections and develop goals for key performance indicators. By convening and leading working groups comprised of state and local public health experts, the CDC Foundation provided a forum for public health professionals to review research and data and discuss common challenges. Information gathered from these working groups informed a state-level commission, responsible for reporting the findings to the state government leaders, who determined how best to apply funds.
“It was a frame shift for many of the jurisdictional health departments, so that’s where having the ability to ramp up and expand that technical assistance was really important for our 95 local health departments in the state,” Hatchett said.
The CDC Foundation is taking those lessons learned and applying them to another public health transformation project: the Maryland Commission on Public Health. The Maryland Commission, launched in 2023, works with leaders across the state to improve public health infrastructure and services. Because each state has different public health needs, determining Maryland’s specific public heath capacity has been step one.
“We’ve been primarily working on assessing state and local health in Maryland, studying how health departments are capable of delivering services, and what are the gaps,” said Hatchett, who now serves as senior advisor and manager to the Maryland commission. “We recognize we’re starting from a different place in the Maryland project—so we’re asking, ‘How do we build on this progress and make it better?’ And so we’re in the thick of that work right now.”
As with the transformation work in Indiana, the findings of these assessments will inform a state level commission that can make recommendations to the governor and General Assembly on where the greatest opportunities for improvement are and how best to strengthen Maryland’s public health system statewide, including at the local level.
Across the country, building public health capacity means having qualified public health professionals in place at the territorial and tribal level. Limited talent pools, long hiring processes and inconsistent funding are just some of the many hiring challenges preventing health departments from recruiting and retaining staff. As part of the broader state transformation work to strengthen the nation’s public health system, the CDC Foundation launched our Workforce Services function.
Created during the COVID pandemic, Workforce Services arose with support initially from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the private sector and has been sustained through jurisdictional partnerships funded by federal and state grants. Since Spring 2021, the CDC Foundation has recruited, hired and onboarded more than 5,000 people to assist understaffed jurisdictions in all 50 states, five big cities, 11 tribal nations and five U.S. territories. Today, Workforce Services provides multi-level support to public health partners across the nation in identifying, hiring and managing vital public health workers.
“We play a pivotal role in helping our jurisdictional partners meet staffing objectives they’ve had challenges meeting on their own,” said Alexis Adams-Wynn, senior portfolio manager, Workforce Services at the CDC Foundation. “We provide supplementary staffing support, rapid resource deployment, help to identify qualified candidates with specialized skill sets, and manage and support those resources to enable our partners to focus on critical public health work.”
Jurisdictions accessing Workforce Services are still in need of public health professionals with experience levels ranging from early career to staff with highly specialized skillsets. Many staff are later hired into the state public health system longer term, which ultimately achieves the CDC Foundation’s strategic focus of strengthening the nation’s public health system.
In fiscal year 2024, Workforce Services helped health departments hire more than 400 staff, with skills ranging from epidemiologists and case investigators to nurses, pharmacists and cloud-based engineers specializing in public health.
As we face an ever-evolving landscape of public health threats, the nation is safest when state and local health departments have the staff and expertise they need to quickly address public health challenges. Through both the state transformation work and Workforce Services, the CDC Foundation is helping provide the tools our public health agencies need to keep us all safe and healthy.