Local public health departments in the United States administer multiple programs to improve the health outcomes of community members within their jurisdictions. Federal and state agencies utilize local public health departments to be the health strategist for their communities by bringing together multiple partners organizations and community members. Therefore, it is critical for health departments to have a strong infrastructure with a competent workforce, modern data systems, and capacity to assess and respond to the community's needs.
For A1 Workforce, Sacramento County Public Health (SCPH) will use this opportunity to hire diverse staff, retain existing staff by improving employee engagement, support staff through better workplace well-being programs, and train employees through implementing the workforce development plan and providing professional development opportunities. Several new positions will be hired to support these workforce development efforts, including a Workforce Development Director, a Program Evaluator, a Data Modernization Director, and a Communications Coordinator. SCPH would also like to continue supporting existing positions that are vital to strengthening the 10 essential public health services, including assessing, investigating, educating and mobilizing partnerships for optimal health.
For A2 Foundational Capabilities, SCPH will support modernization of SCPH to become a stronger service provider and partner. Some activities planned for this include strengthening accountability through achieving public health accreditation, creating new and strengthening existing partnerships, developing a culture of equity and quality, and enhancing communications. These efforts will result in a more competent workforce that is prepared to respond to future public health threats and is capable of meeting diverse community needs.
For A3 Data Modernization, SCPH will improve efficiency and effectiveness in operations by designating a Data Modernization Director and team to assess the current capacity, gaps, and opportunities to modernize the public health data infrastructure, and create and implement a plan for improvement. Modernization opportunities include improving electronic health record data integration and public health laboratory instrumentation interfaces, reviving the performance management database, transforming the community health assessment data dashboard and public epidemiology data dashboards, expanding syndromic surveillance and other real-time data use cases, expanding cloud-native automated public health service enhancements, and collaborating with other agencies to improve early detection of public health threats (e.g. overdoses or foodborne outbreaks). These efforts will result in a data infrastructure that can scale rapidly, accommodate changing needs of public health surveillance and response, and provide predictive ability to identify emerging public health threats.
The outcomes that Sacramento County Public Health (SCPH) will achieve are consistent with the period of performance outcomes in the CDC Project Description and align with the component A logic model for strengthening US Public Health Infrastructure, Workforce, and Data Systems on pages 5-6 of the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO).
