David Remmert has a word for his decades-long career in public health, a word to summarize two, 17-year stints at both the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District and most recently, the DeWitt-Piatt Bi-County Health Department.
"Thirty-one years, I would say, is an anomaly," Remmert said in a recent interview.
Now retired after his most recent role as administrator at the DeWitt-Piatt health department, Remmert is now an assistant professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, part of a new public health degree program that launched this fall.
After decades of reducing funding and an outflow of workers in the public health sector nationwide, Remmert said he's hopeful that a renewed sense of the role of public health workers after COVID-19 may lead to more people choosing the field — and staying long enough to make his tenure less of an "anomaly." At the same time, the McLean County Health Department is preparing to hire more staff thanks to a grant aimed at bolstering the public health workforce's ranks after the pandemic.
'An opportune time'
The first cohort of students into the School of Nursing and Health Sciences' public health degree program is small, about five, Remmert said.
"We didn't complete the process to create that major until around February, so we're still growing into it a little bit right now," he said. "But I think creating this new major falls at a certain time where high schoolers who spent part of their ... career in isolation — now they have a pretty good idea of what public health is all about."
Remmert called the timing "opportune" since, as is the case with private sector healthcare as well, public healthcare has felt a "crush" from from an increasingly retiring workforce, according to a review of that work sector published earlier this year in theAnnual Review of Public Health.
"We have to replace all of these staff that are leaving public health," he said. "We have to prepare both for the fact that public health professionals and nursing professionals are retiring now. That's where the universities come in."
Annual Review of Public Health's look at the public health workforce noted a 23% increase in the number of undergraduates applying to public health programs from 2019 to 2020, but noted it is unclear whether — and not guaranteed — that "increase will be sustained over the long-term."
The review noted also noted there's no guarantee that graduates of a public health degree program will pursue work in government public health efforts, although Remmert said he would encourage that path, having chosen it himself.
"I loved it. It was different every day. It's a great field and it's an opportunity to do a lot of good," he said. "There is an altruistic aspect of it."
The Strengthening Illinois' Public Health Administration grant
McLean County Public Health Administrator Jessica McKnight, who's been at the head of that agency since 2019, said MCHD plans to emphasize that fact when the department rolls out new recruitment material.
"The benefits include a pension, holidays and weekends off — but just overall job satisfaction (via) connection to your community and being able to see and feel the direct impact of your work," McKnight said.
The recruitment efforts MCHD is planning for are thanks to a nearly $280,000 grant award the agency is preparing to use over five years once the Illinois Department of Public Health provides feedback or approval to MCHD's proposed budget.
The money is being administered by the state and is called the Strengthening Illinois Public Health Administration grant; its origins are from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which distributed around $86 million to states for local public health agencies.
The purpose of the money, according to grant documents, is to help the "hiring, retention, training, retraining, and other efforts to support the public health workforce."
In addition to recruitment of new employees, McKnight said MCHD also hopes to use the grant funding to expand its outreach to rural parts of the county.
Although its services are available to anyone in McLean County, MCHD's location in downtown Bloomington may prove challenging for some people to access.
"We've been looking ahead at taking some of our public health services mobile, specifically out into Bloomington-Normal and across our rural communities," she said. "We've written into the budget some positions that would help us with outreach for that."
Although public health departments received a focus during the COVID-19 pandemic for their role in providing vaccinations, testing and enforcement of mitigation measures, both Remmert and McKnight emphasized the work encompasses more than that — and will be just as vital during the next pandemic.
McKnight said part of the reason for amping up MCHD's outreach efforts is related to the public health department's role as a sort-of catch for people that may otherwise fall through the healthcare system's cracks.
Via the mobile outreach, McKnight said the agency will bring "immunizations, dental, our communicable disease program and doing some testing and treatment ... because the McLean County Health Department is for all of McLean County."
Remmert said before he retired from his public health role, he began creating a "new organizational chart" related to funding and addressing "the next pandemic."
"What we went through with COVID is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine an infection like COVID that is just as communicable but twice as deadly. That's what is looming on the horizon — and how are we going to be prepared to deal with it?" he said.
