Public Health Impact and Workforce Investments

Public Health Impact

As Americans are increasingly affected by infections emerging or re-emerging anywhere in the world, identifying and stopping their spread is essential to protecting public health and saving lives. Communities across the nation benefit from the actions taken by state, local, and territorial public health departments to detect, respond, prevent, and control infectious diseases. Examples of benefits include:

• Preventing future outbreaks
• Responding quickly to occurrences of infectious diseases
• Executing prevention and control strategies leading to decreased infectious diseases deaths and illnesses
• Improving health outcomes, health care quality, and health equity

Workforce Investments

Supporting the public health workforce is a cornerstone of ELC. Historically, this support has included investments in both categorical and ‘flexible’ staff, leaders within public health state and local organizations, and training through didactic learning, conferences, and peer-to-peer learning.

Over time, ELC strengthened its commitment through developing a Workforce Assessment that recipients must complete, then using this information to develop a training plan to address gaps in capacity across epidemiology, laboratory, health information systems, bioinformatics, and leadership and management domains.

The ELC Cooperative Agreement continues to provide funding to support positions, participate in trainings, and strengthen competencies within the health department to address infectious disease surveillance, prevention, and response activities.

Technical Assistance Program (TAP)

The purpose of the Technical Assistance Program is to provide technical assistance and critical staffing support to the 64 ELC recipients. This program helps recipients successfully complete COVID-19 related goals and objectives as detailed in their ELC-approved COVID-19 workplans. The program offers recipients an opportunity to secure expertise from contractual staff through September 30, 2024. The positions vary from leadership levels to highly technical positions related to the COVID-19 emergency response and the areas of disease investigation, surveillance, and laboratory testing.