Turning the Focus to Workforce Surveillance

This collection of reports on the public health workforce embodies and amply demonstrates the value of the workforce component of the public health services and systems research (PHSSR) agenda. Building and maintaining—and continuously improving —the public health infrastructure requires concerted efforts at enhancing public health programs, organization, finance, and, of course, the public health workforce. To be most successful, these efforts will be based on rigorous and ongoing collection of the evidence and formulation of evidentiary frameworks within which to frame them. Let us celebrate together the publication of this supplement issue, signaling the “coming of age” of public health workforce research to provide this muchneeded evidence base. Ad hoc efforts at workforce research will always be important to answer particular questions or respond to a time-sensitive issue; many of the papers here fit this description. However, fundamental to the field of workforce research is the ongoing collection of nationwide public health workforce data using a consistent terminology and methods that ensure unduplicated numbers. The surveillance approach to public health workforce data begins as all surveillance does, with agreement on the terminology and taxonomy, followed by agreement on the sampling frame for its collection and where the combined data will be housed. Finally, a long-term investment in regular, periodic surveys of the workforce using these agreed classifications and samples to provide reliable evidence is needed—“data we can count on!” Such data will elucidate the evolving pattern of the public health workforce and allow demonstration of potential contributing factors within the public health system, which may drive/change the workforce. This data-based understanding is essential to effective evidence-based advocacy for educating, building, and maintaining an effective workforce. In short, the sector has needed a shift in the paradigm of workforce data collection from occasional and ad hoc surveys to the time-honored public health approach of ongoing surveillance.