College commencement season is an exciting time, but it also brings a certain level of anxiety. It marks the end of a student’s academic journey and the start of their professional life. To mitigate some of the anxiety, San Diego State University and the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency are celebrating the second year of an innovative collaboration that goes beyond career fairs to focus on steadily replenishing the public health workforce.
The timing for focusing on our public health workforce could not be better, given the challenges facing our nation and some specific to San Diego County: an aging population, persistent chronic disease such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease, behavioral health challenges, homelessness and food insecurity, and environmental factors.
The public health workforce monitors local disease trends, designs interventions to improve health and well-being, and helps connect the people of San Diego to critical health care, housing and nutritional resources.
However, the public health workforce has experienced incredibly high turnover rates, in part due to burnout and stress, lengthy hiring processes, competition for a limited pool of talent and a general lack of visibility for public health careers. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new pressures for public health workers, such as long work hours, criticism and an increase in mistrust of government.
The partnership between SDSU and Health and Human Services Agency — known as the Live Well Center for Innovation and Leadership — aims to mitigate challenges and strengthen opportunities. Not only does our San Diego partnership create a pipeline for local careers and talent retention, but it also facilitates data and research sharing. In short, SDSU students gain valuable hands-on field and research experience, and go on to serve the greater San Diego community. Already more than 50% of Health and Human Services Agency executives are SDSU alumni.
Our formalized academic-practice partnership is a model that can be applied across California, and in cities across the country, to help combat critical public health shortages. Here is how it works.
The partnership prioritizes the success of people. We connect SDSU students with professionals to identify career pathways and jobs and hone skills in resume building, interviewing, and the “soft skills” that employers are looking for — such as communication, teamwork, problem solving and emotional intelligence. This builds students’ confidence as they navigate the completion of their academic journey into the professional world.
The partnership also connects students with university and County of San Diego professionals to build their research skills through projects aimed at reducing health disparities related to homelessness, food insecurity, extreme heat impacts and water contamination in San Diego’s most vulnerable communities.
While the partnership’s first two years concentrated on SDSU’s College of Health and Human Services, plans have already begun to include other SDSU colleges and in the future other academic institutions.
Our partnership did not start on a grand scale. Rather, we started with a small workgroup and the idea that together our two organizations would be stronger and would generate even more robust opportunities to build San Diego’s public health workforce through collaborating in these critical areas.
In other words, we scaled up over time, making this model one that can easily be brought onto other university campuses. You can start small and still achieve big impacts. Even with the well-placed uncertainty as the federal government reshuffles its health care funding priorities, the time is right for a partnership like this.
The benefits go far beyond just SDSU and the Health and Human Services Agency, reaching throughout the region to improve people’s lives for years and decades to come.
Bonomi is dean of SDSU’s College of Health and Human Services and lives in San Diego. Giardina is deputy chief istrative officer for the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency. She lives in San Diego.
