November 18, 2022
New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Introduction

The Public Health Forward: Modernizing the U.S. Public Health System report calls for investment in the recruitment and retention of a diverse and inclusive governmental public health workforce. Health departments are called on to formalize partnerships and programs with academic institutions (including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Agricultural Colleges and Universities, and Tribal colleges and universities), local boards of health, and technical training programs to build a cross-disciplinary workforce and provide students with experiential opportunities in public health. Establishing efforts that are ongoing, institutionalized, and sustainable is key to making a meaningful impact on the recruitment pipeline.

Context

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) workforce development staff use a multi-pronged effort to expose young people to the work of public health. DOHMH workforce development staff engage with community members to promote these opportunities and have established internship programs for high school, undergraduate and graduate students. These efforts are specifically designed with a long-term goal of cultivating a diverse staff and hiring from the communities they serve.

Key Actions

“Walk the walk” of equity.

Health department policies and practices should reflect principles of equity. Health departments can start by conducting an organizational equity assessment.

  • DOHMH’s Race for Justice initiative educates and trains staff about how racism can affect health; studies how racism has impacted their past; creates internal anti-racist policies; and promotes community collaboration to identify ways to address institutionalized injustices. All staff, especially supervisors and those working with students, understand that they are advocates for racial justice.

These can be single sessions or a series, depending on the school’s interest and health department staff availability.

  • DOHMH believes that it is advantageous to introduce students to public health before they enter college. For this reason, they offer a three-session introduction to public health module for high school students. The sessions are free, delivered in person or via real-time video conference, and tailored to the individual school’s curriculum.
  • After the height of the pandemic, DOHMH visited communities heavily impacted by COVID-19 and met with youth, offering them the opportunity to serve as interns and learn about public health.

It can be tempting to view internships as free labor. However, it is important to offer payment — both for the purposes of equity and as an inclusive practice for students who work during their college careers and therefore need paid internships to pursue this type of opportunity.

  • DOHMH leadership asks all programs to provide interns with compensation. This has significantly reduced the number of volunteer-only internships across the agency.

Providing students with meaningful learning opportunities is more likely to generate their interest in a public health career than assigning them primarily to administrative tasks (e.g., data entry).

  • The goal of student internships at DOHMH is to provide students with experience that will make them want to work in public health. Their assignments are designed to start with the student’s current abilities and help them gain additional skills (e.g., hiring a student with research skills but no analytic experience to both collect and analyze data).

Both virtual and in-person career fairs can be excellent venues for spreading the word about job vacancies and any internships offered by the health department.

  • DOHMH workforce development staff partner with human resources around attending career fairs.

Establishing relationships between health departments and employees of nearby schools can lead to more students hearing about public health opportunities and increase the likelihood that the health department will be informed of specific opportunities to recruit students.

Recommendations

Workforce

Assist students with job and internship applications.
  • Many students may be the first in their families to go to college and may not have monetary or experiential support that prepares them for professional environments. Therefore, ensuring that human resources staff and others who interact with students are equipped to proactively provide guidance and assistance during the application process.
    • DOHMH worked with a student during the pandemic who requested to share their computer screen so staff could walk the student through each step of the application process. This experience illustrates the detailed level of assistance that some students require to be successful in applying for a position.
  • Cultivate dedicated mentors. A mentor’s work goes beyond supervising their intern’s assignments. Mentors need sufficient time and bandwidth to provide the student with a highly individualized experience that helps them learn new skills, gain exposure to new issues and activities, and build self-confidence. Therefore, be selective about choosing mentors and train them to ensure they are prepared to provide a professional development experience.
  • Prepare the workplace for students. Mentors need to ensure that staff who will work with the student are aware of their start date and assignments and are prepared to guide the student with the level of detail the student needs to be successful.
  • Help students update their resumes. The final task of a mentor is to work with students to update their resume after the internship is completed. This entails helping the students articulate what they did as an intern in a way that resonates with job recruiters.

Anticipated Impacts For Public Health Departments

DOHMH has successfully hired several students.

DOHMH has successfully hired several students who participated in the internship program and believe that this is directly related to the equity principles embedded in their programs and the way they support interns and strive to provide a valuable and compensated work experience.

Potential Challenges To Implementation

Funding for Internships

It can be difficult to compensate interns for their work due to budget restrictions and/or sentiments that student labor does not need to be paid.

  • Programs throughout DOHMH can benefit from interns, and the health department strives to ensure that these positions are always paid. Therefore, DOHMH requests that programs set aside funds to pay interns as a general practice.

Some students may be interested in positions or internships that require skills or experience they do not yet have. In these situations, it is helpful to keep their information and notify them when other opportunities arise that may be of interest.

Sustainability

Leadership Commitment

Senior leadership’s ongoing dedication to an equitable organizational culture is a critical foundation for success in recruiting a diverse workforce, as is a commitment to provide meaningful learning experiences for students.

  • DOHMH leadership established the Race for Justice Initiative described above to create an anti-racist agency.

Setting expectations and allocating time for specific staff to develop and cultivate partnerships with academic institutions helps maintain the level of activity needed to sustain these practices.

  • DOHMH has 3.5 full-time equivalent staff who support the agency’s internship, training, and other workforce pipeline activities. (While the number of staff may seem high, DOHMH serves a population of 8.8 million.)

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