Deck 18: The Public Health Workforce

Question 1

The academic core of a public health master's (MPH) degree program, which is the most common type of public health degree, includes courses in what five areas?

Answer 1

The five areas are:
-Biostatistics
-Epidemiology
-Environmental health sciences
-Health services administration/policy
-Social and behavioral sciences

Question 2

Public health workers can be found in a wide variety of job settings in both public and private sectors. What are the four main settings for employment of public health care workers and describe each.

Answer 2

Governmental public health: the core public health workforce employed in governmental settings and federal agencies
Nongovernmental public health: settings beyond governmental public health agencies; for example, school districts and individual schools (public, private, parochial)
Hospitals and health care organizations: staff-model and other health maintenance organizations employing public health professionals
Occupational health: subspecialty of public health practice that may take workers into almost any other field as a part of the organization's infrastructure

Question 3

What four main categories can public health occupations be grouped into and what do these categories provide?

Answer 3

The four main categories are management and leadership; professional and scientific; technical and outreach; and support services.
The workforce taxonomy provides a mechanism for standardizing the classification of public health occupations providing a framework for ensuring collection of a set of minimum data elements on all workers in the public health workforce.