Strengthening Detroit's Public Health Workforce - City of Detroit Abstract Summary The Detroit Health Department has developed a comprehensive, research-based, data-driven approach that enables our local health department to successfully implement and execute a 21st Century workforce infrastructure plan for our locality. Covid-19 exposed critical workforce infrastructure gaps within most local health departments nationally. This funding opportunity will allow the Detroit Health Department to strategically assess, redesign, and strengthen our workforce, while making a paradigm shift concentrating on delivering high-quality, equity centered, foundational public health services through strengthening our foundational capabilities, making us a national model for long-term public health workforce infrastructure development. The Detroit Health Department proposes to utilize effective implementation strategies for enhancing communications, human resources, emergency preparedness response, and administrative capabilities to ensure timely, evidenced-based public health services to the citizens of the City of Detroit. Strategic collaborations with workforce development capacity building organizations, program evaluation partners, and community-based organizations to recruit culturally and linguistically appropriate staff and best practices will allow for the department’s success in the implementation of this grant. Desired outcomes for the health department’s project include, but are not limited to: increased capacity to submit an acceptable national accreditation application to the Public Health Accreditation Board and local public health accreditation application to the Michigan Association of Local Public Health; enhanced community outreach to all citizens of Detroit through the effective use of bilingual staff, development of a Community Advisory Board; increased staff capacity to perform the 10 public health essential functions with standardized public health training; enhance the department’s ability to respond to emerging public health crisis with the development of City of Detroit strike team; increase equitable access to all health department services through the streamlining of processes and procedures, and systems; enhance the health department’s communications strategy through the effective implementation and evaluation of a strategic communications plan; and strengthen the organizational competencies that address human resource, information technology, financial management which includes grants and contracts, and the procurement process. Overall, staff satisfaction and community usage of health department programs should increase over the course of the project implementation.
