Health Educators in State/Local Public Health Departments: Training Needs and Awareness of Emerging Areas of Public Health Practice

Abstract

Although great progress has been made to define the field of health education and provide a voluntary certification system for professionals, research about the governmental health educator and health education specialist workforce is limited. The 2017 PH WINS (Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey) provides valuable data on understanding the workforce demographics, attitudes, and training needs of governmental public health workers, including health educators, and informs future investments in workforce development efforts nationally. The purpose of this article is to examine demographics, job engagement and satisfaction, training needs, certification, and other characteristics of health educators and certified health education specialists (CHES) from PH WINS. We analyzed the data to describe the health educator workforce and compared it with the national governmental workforce across a range of variables. Compared with the national 2017 PH WINS sample, health educators were relatively younger, more ethnically diverse, more likely to be educated with an advanced degree, and were predominately employed in local versus state public health agencies. Health educators sampled were significantly more knowledgeable of all public health concepts compared with the national 2017 PH WINS respondent workforce. Comparison of CHES versus non-CHES professionals is also provided, along with practice and policy implications based on the data. This is the first detailed analyses of health educators in state and local health departments, with important findings and implications related to workforce composition, satisfaction, retention, and training. Further cross-sectional workforce research is needed to understand the current strengths and gaps in the health education workforce.