Addressing Urgent Calls for Public Health Workforce Planning: Establishing and Implementing National Indicators to Profile and Monitor the Public Health Workforce in Canada

The Chief Public Health Officer's Report on the State of Public Health in Canada 2021 calls for urgent attention toward public health workforce planning and capacity development given ongoing workforce burdens due to COVID-19 and other emerging public health crises. However, the lack of data and infrastructure prevents us from assessing and monitoring trends in the Canadian public health workforce. The overall goals of this project are to establish standardized public health workforce indicators and develop a data collection system to support assessment/profiling of the Canadian public health workforce. In our project we will develop indicators that can be used to understand the diverse characteristics, learning and organizational needs of the public health workforce. We will work together with national and provincial collaborators which include public health decision-makers and organizations to survey the public health workforce in Canada using the newly developed indicators. Findings from the study will be provided to policy and practice decision-makers to be used for human resource planning, recruitment, retention, and professional development decision-making to safeguard the public health system in efficiently responding to future public health crises.