Making Public Health Public: NYS Dept. of Health Uses PHIG to Expand its Reach and its Workforce
Success StoriesWhen the COVID-19 pandemic hit, gaps in public health communication became impossible to ignore. Getting the word out about PPE, vaccines, and essential services revealed a hard truth: public health wasn’t visible enough, and that had real consequences.
Keshana Owens-Cody, Division Director at the New York State Department of Health, shares how PHIG funding is helping New York address that gap head-on with a simple but powerful mission: make public health public. From revamping the outdated Public Health Works website to manning an in-person station at the New York State Fair, her team is meeting people where they are: helping people understand what their health department is and does, and connecting students and job seekers to public health careers.
This new approach is already producing results in their hiring process – the department is seeing more applicants from a broader array of sources, which better reflects the unique population of New York State. But visibility is only half the battle. Behind every essential public health service is critical, agency-level infrastructure: human resources, workforce training, communications, project management, etc. Without investment in those “back-end” operations, even the best frontline efforts fall short. PHIG funding is making agency-level improvements possible, and the results speak for themselves: new recruitment sources, streamlined internal processes, and a public health workforce that better reflects the communities it serves.
Video Transcript
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
What was the situation in New York prior to PHIG?
When I came on as the workforce director, and I looked at the narrative, and I saw all the different positions, all the different programs that we were supposed to implement through the PHIG grant, what I caught was: there was a need for more visibility around public health in New York State. This was a lesson learned from COVID as well, in terms of getting the word out around PPE, places to get vaccines – we recognized that there was a need to make public health public. So that became kind of the running theme behind all of the work of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant in New York State.
How are you bringing this to life internally and externally?
So internally, we recognized that one of our websites, Public Health Works, was supposed to be drawing folks to understand all the different ways that you can connect to public health, especially those who are students and want to connect and find opportunities to work in the public health department. We revised that website. The website was a little outdated, and we took some time to really think about students and those who might be looking for a career in public health now: What they’d be looking for, what information do they need, and also, how do we streamline all the different ways that you can connect to employment in public health? So that’s one of our internal examples.
Externally, another big thing that we did was: we took advantage of going to the New York State Fair and educating the public on careers in public health, and “what is public health and what does it mean?” So, students and families had a chance to not only look at careers, but they got to touch and feel and get a sense of what public health is all about. We had selfie stations. Our commissioner came out and also got to play around in the station as well. But we were trying to continue, I guess, taking our streamlined approaches that we did with the website, but then also bringing them out into the community as well.
What’s been the impact of this work?
When working on our approaches to increasing our recruitment strategies, some of the things that we did included the state fair, but we’ve also tabled at the APHA (American Public Health Association) conference as well. And one of the things that we were able to do with our human resources team is to be able to look at: where are we sourcing our applicants following this recruitment strategy that we did?
Normally, we have a balance of internal and external candidates for roles, and usually that’s all that you see. But once we hit a certain number of candidates, our HR team starts to also look at where we’re getting candidates. So over 100 applicants is usually their threshold when they start to give us other sources, and APHA is one of our new sources, as well as Public Health Careers. Since we’re using those new platforms or we’re going out in the community ourselves and educating folks on careers, now we have different ways that we can see where we are really getting our applicants from.
Why is this work so important?
To improve the health and well-being of all of New York State, it takes all walks of life to be a part of that. I think that by being able to go out in the community, talk to different people about public health careers, as well as just public health services in general, that’s opened up their eyes to see what public health is all about, and helped them see themselves in different careers in public health as well. Without PHIG funding, we are not able to effectively support the back end of the public health department. We’ve been able to do incredible things with the funding, to be able to really streamline approaches, close up gaps, and improve processes. We’re not the ones who are necessarily delivering the 10 essential public health services. We’re behind, we’re the back operations, and we’re the bench. And we’re able to bring in a variety of different resources because of the funding, whether it’s training and development opportunities or bringing in a project management team to work through a process directly with teams. But without these funding opportunities or without this funding source, the efficiency of the public health departments going into 2.0 and 3.0 iterations won’t be the same. So we need to continue public health infrastructure funding.