TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - The Public Health Workforce A1 - Yeager, Valerie A. A2 - Boulton, Matthew L. A2 - Wallace, Robert B. Y1 - 2022 N1 - T2 - Maxcy-Rosenau-Last Public Health & Preventive Medicine, 16e AB - The wide range of activities subsumed under the rubric of public health practice is provided by a large and diverse workforce. Assessing the size and composition of the public health workforce facilitates information necessary to identify workforce gaps, forecast trends and needs, and guide workforce development policies. In sum, enumerating the public health workforce is a crucial step toward strengthening the workforce infrastructure. Despite the value in enumerating the public health workforce, this is no easy task as there is no standard system of monitoring the public health workforce or standard worker title or classification scheme. Further, public health includes diverse employment settings (federal, state, and local) entailing highly varied roles and disciplines across these settings. In the most recent effort to enumerate governmental public health workers in the United States, an estimated 290,988 were identified in federal, state, and local public health agencies.1 This chapter presents insights about the makeup of the governmental public health workforce and its disciplines, public health practice settings and evolving system changes, educational backgrounds of the workforce and training programs, and ongoing challenges for the public health workforce. (See Chapter 9: Public Health Practice in the United States.) SN - PB - McGraw Hill CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/03/28 UR - accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1182685550 ER -