Public Health Workforce Taxonomy

Abstract

Thoroughly characterizing and continuously monitoring the public health workforce is necessary for ensuring capacity to deliver public health services. A prerequisite for this is to develop a standardized methodology for classifying public health workers, permitting valid comparisons across agencies and over time, which does not exist for the public health workforce. An expert working group, all of whom are authors on this paper, was convened during 2012-2014 to develop a public health workforce taxonomy. The purpose of the taxonomy is to facilitate the systematic characterization of all public health workers while delineating a set of minimum data elements to be used in workforce surveys. The taxonomy will improve the comparability across surveys, assist with estimating duplicate counting of workers, provide a framework for describing the size and composition of the workforce, and address other challenges to workforce enumeration. The taxonomy consists of 12 axes, with each axis describing a key characteristic of public health workers. Within each axis are multiple categories, and sometimes subcategories, that further define that worker characteristic. The workforce taxonomy axes are occupation, workplace setting, employer, education, licensure, certification, job tasks, program area, public health specialization area, funding source, condition of employment, and demographics. The taxonomy is not intended to serve as a replacement for occupational classifications but rather is a tool for systematically categorizing worker characteristics. The taxonomy will continue to evolve as organizations implement it and recommend ways to improve this tool for more accurate workforce data collection.

The Methods Behind PH WINS

“…The final version of PH WINS draws heavily from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Technical Assistance and Service Improvement Initiative: Project Officer Survey; the 2009 Epidemiology Capacity Assessment; the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey; the Public Health Foundation Worker Survey; the Bowling Green State University Job in General Scale; and the University of Michigan Public Health Workforce Schema. 23 – 28 Cognitive interviews were conducted, and the instrument was pretested among 3 groups of state and local public health practitioners. After each round of pretesting, the survey was streamlined and a small number of items were modified for accessibility and clarity.…”

Public health job advertisements in Australia and New Zealand: a changing landscape

“…We also wished for this set of jobs to be unlikely to be double‐counted by researchers of other workforces if they had access to the same data. Therefore, jobs that had clinical duties, or roles that were not traditionally ‘public health’ were only included if the reviewer felt the role, duty and program area were ‘more public health than not’, which was guided by a published taxonomy of the public health workforce 6 . Job advertisements were excluded if they were volunteer positions, internships, cadetships or generic listings for a recruitment pool.…”

Experiencia intersectorial para reducir la brecha del recurso humano en salud pública a nivel técnico operativo en miembros del servicio militar voluntario del Perú

“…Se caracteriza por su complejidad y diversidad, e incluye a personas procedentes de un amplio rango de ocupaciones y entrenados en una gran variedad de instituciones (2) . La fuerza de trabajo de salud pública es clave en todo sistema nacional de salud (3) , y complementa los sistemas de información de salud pública, la capacidad organizacional, las tecnologías sanitarias y a los recursos financieros (4) . Actualmente, el Perú se encuentra en un proceso de implementación de reformas en el sector Salud, las cuales han tenido mayor énfasis en la atención recuperativa; sin embargo, entre las medidas destinadas a mejorar el estado de salud de la población se ha establecido el diseñar e implementar la carrera de "técnicos en salud pública" (5) .…”