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Introduction

On February 28, 2022, the Roundtable on Population Health Improvement held a virtual workshop titled A Population Health Workforce to Meet 21st Century Challenges and Opportunities. Raymond Baxter began with a land acknowledgment recognizing the Nacotchtank and Piscataway people and elders, on whose land Washington, D.C. (home of the National Academies) is situated. Baxter shared the roundtable’s vision and mission: the roundtable recognizes that health and quality of life for all is shaped by interdependent, historical, contemporary, social, political, economic, environmental, genetic, behavioral, and health care factors, and it seeks to provoke and catalyze urgently needed multi-sector collaboration.

The roundtable hosts several workshops each year that bring together different perspectives and disciplines and sectors to explore and share what works to improve equitable health and well-being in at-risk communities, Baxter said. The context for the present event includes several National Academies projects on public health and public health workforce, Baxter said, and he encouraged attendees to review meeting materials. He provided a summary of the previous public health workforce workshop held in 2019 (NASEM, 2021). At the previous workshop, speakers discussed how to support a population health orientation among public health leaders and workers, and how to frame within the context of population health the importance of community health workers, health navigators, peer to peer educators, and leveraging the competencies of both public- and private-sector workforces, including those working at the interface with other domains such as education, transportation, and planning. The current workshop (see Box 1-1 for the Statement of Task)

was intended to build on and update those previous discussions, with more recent insights gained from the field’s response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including challenges faced by public health workers, renewed policymaker attention, and public expenditures directed to supporting the public health workforce. The workshop was organized by a planning committee (see front matter), and Phyllis Meadows of the Kresge Foundation and Jose Montero of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provided additional assistance.

Baxter said that the workshop was intended to showcase the training and roles of and settings for workers in population health—broadly defined as all those who protect the public’s health across various sectors and domains, and to highlight:

• Historical contexts and legal frameworks that have shaped that workforce
• Aspects of the current state of workforce: challenges and opportunities, equity, representation
• Competencies, training, and career pathways, along with perspectives of educators and the next generation of workers in the field

The workshop proceedings consists of five chapters and four appendixes. Chapter 2 summarizes context-setting talks, Chapter 3 highlights innovative solutions to the challenges being faced by the population health workforce, Chapter 4 discusses pathways, competencies, training, and education, and Chapter 5 provides some closing reflections. Chapters 2–4 each include an overview of moderator opening remarks, panelist presentations, and discussion, along with a question-and-answer session with the audience. The appendixes consist of references, biographical sketches of speakers and the planning committee, the workshop agenda, and the readings and resources provided to workshop attendees as part of the attendee packet.¹

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¹https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/02-28-2022/a-population-health-workforce-to-meet-21st-century-challenges-and-opportunities-a-workshop (accessed July 28, 2023).

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