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Among public health agencies,expanding remote work opportunities by many state health departments (SHDs) has increased the pool of candidates for state positions, including people working at local health departments(LHDs). SHDs often pay better than LHDs, especially when compared with salaries among rural LHDs. Rural LHDs particularly struggle to recruit public health–trained employees, and the increase in remote work options by SHDs may exacerbate rural LHD recruitment and retention challenges. At the same time, having SHD staff who have lived experience working in rural jurisdictions and who reside in rural communities may also be a benefit and can potentially grow the SHD’s connections and responsiveness to their rural constituents. This study sought to explore perspectives on remote work among rural LHD leaders and how remote work practices among SHDs may be affecting their efforts.

The January/February 2023 Journal of Public Health Management and Practice Supplement (Vol. 29, Issue S1)1 presents findings from the 2021 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS). The supplement provides insight into governmental public health workforce dynamics; this commentary provides insight into how the findings compare to broader US labor market trends and potential implications in light of current labor market uncertainty.

Local health departments and healthcare organizations in rural areas face challenges, including workforce shortages and complex population health-related needs. While they share related roles in their communities, incentives to collaborate may be sparse. This study describes the purpose, motivations, benefits, and barriers to collaborations between local health departments and healthcare delivery organizations serving rural communities, with a focus on workforce factors.

Since 2020, there has been substantial media coverage of LHD restructuring—particularly the dissolution of large health districts. The purpose of this study is to identify and characterize the motivations and perceived impacts of formal structural changes to local health departments (LHDs), with a specific focus on perceived impacts for the public health workforce.

The Putting Our People First: Discussion Guide for Public Health Agencies to Advance Worker Well-being is a customizable tool to address worker needs and promote a culture of well-being. This paper shares lessons from Maryland's pilot sites and highlights how the guide can be adapted to local context, with insights that can be scaled across public health agencies to foster a culture of well-being and better support and sustain a strong, effective workforce to deliver essential services and respond to community needs.

This paper characterizes burnout among state and local governmental public health workers and identifies implications for public health workforce capacity and sustainability.

While there is a growing recognition of the need to consider rurality in public health, our understanding of the rural local public health workforce nationally remains narrow, in part due to gaps in available data and analyses.  Notably, variation in how rurality is defined represents a longstanding challenge for both public health research and practice, especially in public health, where jurisdictional boundaries differ. However, data on the rural public health workforce are increasingly available. National data from the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) are pivotal in characterizing the local public health workforce, yet data specific to small and rural LHDs were limited until recently. In the most recent iteration of PH WINS in 2024, agencies of all sizes across the country were eligible to participate, making this the first national dataset representing the rural public health workforce.

The purpose of the current study is to use PH WINS 2024 data to provide the first national description of the rural local public health workforce across the United States, with a focus on demographic, educational, and positional characteristics, as well as intentions to stay or leave their organizations.

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The January/February 2023 Journal of Public Health Management and Practice Supplement (Vol. 29, Issue S1)1 presents findings from the 2021 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS). The supplement provides insight into governmental public health workforce dynamics.  This commentary serves as an introduction providing insight into how the findings compare to broader US labor market trends and potential implications in light of current labor market uncertainty.

Although the public health workforce is acknowledged to be much broader, research on the workforce focuses almost exclusively on local, state, tribal, or territorial governmental health departments. Previous constructs of the public health workforce in the United States have acknowledged that individuals in many sectors contribute to public health, including “those who work for official public health agencies at all levels of government, community-based and voluntary organizations with a health promotion focus, the public health-related staff of hospitals and health care systems, and a range of others in private industry, government, and the voluntary sector.

This article proposes a new, intersectional definition of the public health workforce in the United States based on services provided.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly changing the way Human Resources (HR) professionals perform their jobs. Changes to HR technology in talent acquisition, or recruitment, processes are being implemented across myriad industries. These processes may include the building of job descriptions, candidate sourcing, job application, resume scanning and ranking, and interview planning and scheduling. This review explores the benefits and challenges of Artificial Intelligence use in Human Resources, with a focus on recruitment processes.

In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists suggested approaches, including upskilling and recruitment/hiring, to strengthen the workforce capacity in public health data science. We estimated the number of recently graduated data scientists who might be eligible for and potentially hirable into government public health jobs as a step toward filling data gaps in workforce planning.

Governmental public health workers age 35 or younger have been shown to experience lower retention rates than older workers. Salaries are often a factor in retention, but because health departments sometimes face restrictions in improving salaries, health departments might explore offering nontraditional benefits to attract and retain workers.  This study analyzes data from the 2024 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) to determine whether nontraditional benefits are more highly valued by younger workers than older workers.