Friday, April 26, 2024
4/26/2024
The Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) plans to use funding provided by the CDC’s Strengthening U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Workforce, and Data Systems grant to meet critical infrastructure needs by expanding the public health workforce; advancing data modernization; and building the foundational capabilities identified by state, local, tribal, and community partners as weaknesses during the COVID-19 response, including equity, communications, and community partnership development. Infrastructure investments from this grant will fill urgent gaps in the short-term, while public health leaders across the state continue to pilot innovations and seek additional long-term investments for transformation needed to make the entire public health system work better for all communities. Under the workforce strategy, MDH intends to increase the size and capabilities of the public health workforce with improved wages and protections and increase hiring of diverse staff by: • Hiring a Workforce Development Director to lead strategic workforce development and organizational culture efforts. • Enhancing local public health department foundational capabilities in equity, partnership development, and assessment and surveillance, and providing direct funding to local health departments. • Building partnerships to address future workforce needs and developing pathways into governmental public health jobs. • Building an Office of American Indian Health and providing direct funding to tribal health departments. • Ensuring that MDH remains ready to respond to any public health emergency by developing a response-ready cadre of staff and investing in emergency preparedness and response communications, planning, and data analysis core functions. • Conducting a comprehensive review of practices and policies that support our workforce and enhancing our ability to compete in a competitive labor market, including a review of position classifications, pay equity, and career paths. • Embedding health equity into recruitment and hiring practices, fostering continuing learning opportunities and employee development, and developing anti-racism and racial equity trainings. • Bolstering agency administrative capacity to hire, to collect, analyze, and monitor staffing data from an equity perspective, and to host Public Health AmeriCorps members. • Increasing staff retention, with a focus on understanding and improving retention of staff with diverse backgrounds, by reviewing and modifying policies, enhancing employee benefits and incentives, and improving our ability to analyze retention data. Under the foundational capabilities strategy, MDH intends to improve organizational systems and processes and strengthen public health foundational capabilities by: • Embedding health equity expertise across the agency, addressing structural bias in grantmaking, and integrating equity and community voice along the data continuum. • Increasing statewide public health communications capacity with a focus on rural Minnesota. • Increasing the ability of local public health to incorporate equity into community health assessment and improvement processes. • Increasing the use of strategic planning to align public health system transformation efforts across the state. • Improving processes and capacity for contracting and procurement. Under the Data Modernization strategy, MDH intends to develop a more modern, efficient, and interoperable data environment, and increase availability and use of public health data by: • Building on existing workforce and infrastructure assessments to do gap analyses and create implementation plans. • Creating modernization plans for key public health data systems to align with the North Star Vision. • Creating workforce development plans for staff working with data, interoperability, informatics, and information technology. • Building a modern public health data portal, using data lakes and modern data sharing and visualization tools.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).
