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The Affordable Care Act’s Public Health Workforce Provisions : Opportunities and Challenges
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June 2011
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Series: Issue brief
[PDF-3.96 MB]
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Content Notes:A main tenet of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the health care reform law signed in March 2010, is to transform our “sick care” system into one that focuses on prevention and health promotion. The success of this transformation largely rests on a sufficiently sized, adequately trained workforce that can provide the community and clinical preventive health services that are needed to promote and protect the nation’s health.
Despite the importance of public health to the well-being of society, the workforce responsible for ensuring the public’s health faces critical challenges, including:
• substantial decreases in funding, resources, and staff,
• inadequate training, and
• inequitable distribution in areas of greatest need.
The recent economic downturn accelerated declines in the governmental public health workforce. Estimates indicate approximately 44,000 governmental public health jobs at the state and local levels, or 19% of the 2008 workforce, were lost between 2008 and 2010. Worker shortages and budget cuts mean public health workers have to do more with less, which exacerbates the already difficult task of worker recruitment and retention, and results in reduced public health services. Among state health agencies, nearly nine out of 10 (89%) cut services between 2008 and 2010.
This brief was partially supported by CDC grant 5U38HM000459-03.
apha_workforce.ashx
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Pages in Document:19 numbered pages
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