A Population Health Workforce to Meet 21st Century Challenges and Opportunities: Proceedings of a Workshop (2023)
Chapter: 5 Closing Reflections
5
Closing Reflections
Concluding remarks were offered by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics as well as Lee Goldman, M.D. Endowed Chair and professor of medicine, and the inaugural vice dean for population health and health equity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.
Bibbins-Domingo spoke about how the population health workforce is defined and how this definition often goes beyond traditional governmental public health. “The population health landscape is broad and includes traditional governmental public health, health care, community-based organizations, the social sector, policy makers, those who are actively engaged in population health and those who recognize they work in population health, as well as those whose work is crucial to population health but do not recognize it as such,” she said. She pointed to the population health programs in many states and in Indian country that were characterized by “innovation, cross-sector collaboration, data, and community outreach.” Bibbins-Domingo applauded the many on-the-ground outreach efforts best exemplified by different community health worker models.
Bibbins-Domingo mentioned the funding challenges discussed during the day and suggested that health care is part of the solution for advancing population health but that it can also serve as a barrier. She described how power differentials among different kinds of organizations and categories of workers make equity in the workforce a front-and-center issue. Governmental public health experiences racial and gender
inequity across professional opportunity, leadership, and compensation. “I heard many optimistic comments here,” Bibbins-Domingo said, “but the importance is if we want to do this work equitably we need to be able to figure out how to create capacity for equity work and then scale this capacity equitably.” She also acknowledged the toll that the past several years have taken on the population health and public health workforce because of the COVID-19 pandemic; even prior to the pandemic, she said, this workforce was prone to losing talent to other sectors. She emphasized how data gaps complicate the effort to enumerate the workforce and what types of occupations are available in this field, which has implications for scalability, financing, and equity. Bibbins-Domingo said that she was inspired by the passion for population health among the speakers, and the many innovative models, opportunities, and challenges.
Bibbins-Domingo then pointed to two topics discussed during the workshop: The first concerned how best to think about and define population health and public health and how to move toward a holistic view of advancing the health of the public and away from the “narrow reductionist” view that has defined the fields for a very long time. Second, she reiterated that the COVID-19 pandemic had one benefit, that is, it made the population health workforce “more visible and highlighted the importance of population health as a field.” She concluded by emphasizing how important it will be to continue and extend the discussions held during this workshop and to work together to ensure the advancement of population health.
