Nearly half of all public health workers in state and local agencies left their positions over the last half-decade, a new study found.
Comparing public health agency staff lists from 2017 with those of 2021, researchers led by Jonathon P. Leider, PhD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, discovered that 46% of workers were no longer present in 2021.
Importantly, more than 100,000 workers — which amounts to half of the total governmental public health workforce — could leave by 2025 if current trends continue, the group detailed in Health Affairs.
Their study tracked intent to leave as well as actual separations of 150,000 workers at close to 100 agencies participating in the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey (PH WINS) in 2017 and 2021.
“Even though we’ve had so many people already leave, we still have 40% plus of the workforce saying, ‘I’m thinking about leaving,'” Leider told MedPage Today. “These are the people that are more educated in public health science than ever before, in pandemic crisis management than ever before. How do you replace people like that?”
As for the characteristics of those who left, Leider said the researchers observed a “first-in, first-out-the-door” scenario, with roughly three-quarters of workers 35 and younger and of those with 5 years or less tenure no longer at a public health agency by 2021.
Workers that had been with an agency 10 years or more, meanwhile, were much less likely to leave, he said.
Intentions vs Actions
What caught Leider and his colleagues’ attention was the inverse relationship they found between workers’ intent to leave and actual separations, both by age and by tenure — information they gleaned from the survey data.
Of the public health workers with 5 years of experience or less in 2017, about half said they planned to leave, but in actuality 77% left their organization by 2021. Similarly, among those 35 and younger, only 43% considered leaving in 2017 but 74% ultimately left.
Conversely, among those who had been at their agency 21 years or more, 83% said they were thinking about leaving within the next 5 years, but only 41% had by 2021.
While that “flip” in intentions versus actions wasn’t entirely surprising, “the scale of it was very surprising,” said Leider.
Among state, big-city, and other local public health employees, those who had been with their agencies for 5 years or less were 10 to 17 times more likely to actually leave compared with employees with more than 5 years of tenure:
State: adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 17.4 (95% CI 15.00-20.18, P
Source : MedPageToday