150th Year, U. S. Public Health Service

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1 Vol. 39 Anniversary Program 150th Year, U. S. Public Health Service Training of Health Man Power * LOWELL J. REED, PH.D., F.AP.H.A. Vice-President, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. IT is a privilege to speak at this meeting which is devoted to commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the U. S. Public Health Service. All of us who have been working actively with the Service during the period of its greatest growth and are now sharing in its efforts to make public health mean the health of the public, take great pleasure in its past developments and in the prospects ahead. This rapid growth has brought to the fore the fact that our present programs and those that we envision for the future cannot be successful unless we make more adequate provisions for developing the necessary personnel. It is therefore appropriate that someone should discuss the topic assigned to me today. As in the case of all large-scale social movements, our problem is that of providing the staff of workers needed for the task, and this involves not merely the setting up of the mechanisms for appropriate training but also the more difficult one of recruiting the individuals to be trained. I shall, therefore, discuss both phases of this question and suggest certain possible solutions. As an approach to the subject, we might review briefly past approaches to the problems of recruitment and training and the present status of such efforts. *Presented before the Health Officers Section of the American Public Health Association at the Seventysixth Annual Meeting in Boston, Mass., November 9, Paper No. 248 from the Department of Biostatistics, School of Hygiene and Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. During the early stages of the public health movement, programs were left to some public-spirited individual, usually a doctor who, on the basis of such training as he had had, served as health officer. The subordinate personnel, if there were any, had no specific training. Among the early approaches to education directed expressly at public health, stands the London School of Tropical Medicine, by means of which England undertook the training of medical officers for the colonies. Although these men were called medical officers, their activities were primarily in public health, and in this effort we see a deliberate attempt at health officer training. A more unique approach to the matter was the early school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, under the stimulus of Sedgwick and Whipple, the disciplines of biology and engineering were united in an approach to health matters. The emphasis here was on the sanitary aspects of public health work, that being the most important problem of that time. A number of the people now active in public health work are products of that school and of that stimulus. As the scope of public health increased, the need for giving more specific public health training to physicians became apparent. The result was the setting up of training centers in public health, either as independent schools or as departments within medical schools. In either case, efforts were mainly devoted to the developing of appropriate 03]

2 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH 304 Mar., 1949 training for health officers under the concept that had been growing within this country that health officers should be graduates of medicine. These schools, however, did not limit themselves to the training of health officers but immediately started to develop training opportunities for the variety of specialists other than doctors of medicine. As a result, we now have graduate training opportunities for such classes of public health specialists as bacteriologists, parasitologists, epidemiologists, statisticians, sanitary engineers, industrial hygienists, nutritionists, public health educators, specialists in the public health aspects of tuberculosis, venereal diseases, maternal and infancy hygiene, and in many other fields. The teaching centers offering these varieties of training have been organized into a system of approved schools of public health, which provides for a certain unification of the educational efforts without impeding the development of new courses of study. The addition of new schools, such as the one recently announced at the University of Pittsburgh, and the initiation of new interests in the schools already established, assures us, I believe, that we shall have reasonable coverage in so far as graduate and postgraduate training is concerned. In this educational movement, however, there is an inherent weakness, in that we have set up a graduate pattern withoiut making the necessary provision for the flow of personnel from the lower programs of education into this graduate field. Looking back, it is easy to see that the mistake was a natural one, for so much of the thought thirty years ago was concerned with the question of training -medical men to be health officers that the educational flow was assumed to be that of a premedical course, training in medicine, and then graduate work in public health. The problem of new recruitment was supposed to be that of stimulating medical men to take this training and to encourage this result; courses in preventive medicine were introduced in the medical schools. This approach to the problem overlooked the need for revealing to young men and women interested in fields other than medicine the opportunities that existed for them in the area of public health. Movements in this direction were made through the establishment of courses in public health at the college level. Unfortunately, however, in the period of intense interest in developing graduate schools, there was a tendency-conscious or unconscious-to frown on these efforts at the undergraduate level, and progress along these lines has not been what it should have been during the past generation. In a talk given to a. similar audience a year ago, I called attention to the fact that the shortage of personnel apparent in so many of the activities of society is not, as a great many people assume, a product of the war, but is rather a result of the fact that the man power demands of our highly industrialized society and of our expanding social programs exceed the supply.in our present population. Competition for the brains and abilities of young people will be more intense in the generation to come than it has ever been. There is no way for the field of public health to face this competition except through the development of an interest in public health on the part of our young people at college and at high school. levels. Looking at medical education, we see that here we were forced to establish, on a systematic basis, premedical courses for the man going into medicine. Without the establishment of such courses we would not have had, and would not now have, the flow of well qualified young people into the field of medicine that is needed to keep up our supply of physicians. It is my opinion that the creation along similar lines of a " pre-

3 150TH YEAR U.S.P.H.S. Vol publichealth" course offers one of the most important approaches to our problem of recruitment and training. It would be desirable for the agencies that do the broad planning for public health, that is, the American Public Health Association, the U. S. Public Health Service, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers, and the schools of public health, to consider seriously an organized approach to undergraduate training in public health., It is well known to all of you that certain universities do offer such training, but the maovement has none of the stability and force that has been achieved in the graduate program. We almost seem to be building an army of generals in public health without the necessary soldiers. I cannot leave this subject without presenting some of my concepts with regard to this undergraduate course. I believe that it should be, in so far as possible, a unified course for the wide variety of people going into the field of public health, and should not be framed in such a way as to encourage too early specialization. There are certain basic disciplines at the collegiate level that all persons should cover if they expect to carve out a real career along the lines of any one of the numerous activities embraced under the title "public health." In general, the four years of collegiate training should include specific courses in the natural sciences including mathematics, in the social sciences, in psychology, and in those general cultural subjects that all college students are encouraged to include in their curriculum. The case for the natural sciences is clear. The public health movement is so firmly based on scientific findings that no young person should be encouraged to enter the field of public health without a fairly substantial training in the sciences at the collegiate level. Neither is there any argument with regard to the social sciences; public health being a social activity, students should take specific courses in this field. I should include within tftis group, not merely the usual courses that one thinks of under the heading of social science, but I should like to see developed a course in what might be called " social economics "; also a course in geography which would embrace training with regard to human populations and the relationship of these populations to their environments and their natural resources, since knowledge of these factors is basic to public health work. A course in psychology is desirable because so much of the work in public health has to do with the question of human relations, and a general course in this field can furnish an excellent basis for an understanding of some of these forces. The remainder of the 4 year course would be, as previously stated, filled in with general cultural subjects. If properly developed, graduates from such a course would not be debarred from entering the field of medicine, even though they had not taken a premedical course. This would be a desirable thing because our present training program in medicine demands a rather early decision on the part of our young people as to whether or not they wish to enter medicine. We thereby tend to lose certain excellent individuals from medicine that we might have available if their training in the type of course described were such as to enable them to make the decision to go into medicine at some time toward the end of their collegiate career. 0 Graduates of such a "pre-publichealth " course would be suitable material for the numerous public health positions at the technical level below that of heads of departments and divisions. But more important than that, this course would provide a steady flow of young

4 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH 306 Mar., 1949 people stimulated to thinking about public health and to developing careers in this field, and from this group we might expect to get the wider variety and the increasing number of graduate students that the future of public health demands. Another opportunity for training in the field of public health which offers a good deal of promise, is that of inservice training. Various approaches to this problem have been made and in the past a great deal of pressure has been put on the schools of public health to develop such training as an active part of their own program. I should like to say that I believe this to be a mistake. Sound inservice training programs can best be provided by the operating agencies in public health. The schools should be expected to supply lecturers for such programs, and to cooperate with the plan in other ways, but I believe that it should not be left to the schools to take the initiative here. I should like to see all of the larger health departments add a person to their staffs whose function would be that of education. Their return for the support of such an individual would be the improvement of their personnel within all lines of departmental activities. Certain health departments have done this to some degree, and in every case that I know of, it has borne fruit. One final area for training in the field of public health that should not be overlooked is that of education of the public itself. In the days when the public health movement was small, this was relatively unimportant, but now that we are engaged in a full-fledged social program, it becomes increasingly important that the public be constantly educated as to the meaning and the objectives of public health. In this, the public health educator is an important person. His functions, however, are not very clearly defined because the field of public health has no real program for education of the public. It would be wise therefore to leave the training of public health educators in a fluid state until more experiments in this type of education have been conducted. With regard to our approach to the problem of training the public, it would be well to note the movement in relationship to the public school system that has resulted in the organization of Parent-Teachers Associations. We need similar public organizations in the field of public health. No one has yet proposed a plan under which these might be developed, and in many cases the health officer has had a tendency to discourage active interest in his problem on the part of community groups. The fact that the public will take an active interest in health problems is clearly indicated by a variety of minor specific instances; one that has attracted my attention recently was the eagerness with which people in different blocks in the City of Baltimore were willing to form teams in a program for cleaning up the rats of the city. The fact that general interest in public health can be awakened around specific needs, such as poliomyelitis, heart disease, tuberculosis, cancer, etc., has led to the growth of powerful public organizations in these fields. These groups benefit from the fact that they are devoted to specific problems, but this fact is also a weakness in our development of a balanced health program. Perhaps the one general field that the population of this country has shown an interest in getting behind is that of " medical care." If we can maintain this concept on a broad basis, it might be made the keynote for an approach to the education of the public in health matters. At any rate, there is an opportunity for leadership in public health to furnish the people of the country with additional outlets for their energies and interests in health problems. When we have such an outlet on a comprehensive rather than a specific

5 basis, our program of education of the population in general with regard to public health will be a simple one and the field of action of the health educator will be clarified. I have painted a rather sweeping picture of training in public health. I have done this deliberately because I feel that at a meeting such as this, where we are celebrating the anniversary of 150TH YEAR U.S.P.H.S. Vol the organization that is set up to supply leadership, it would be well to take a broad point of view. I feel confident that the future will see developed many of the areas that I have discussed here and indeed many others that I have failed to mention, and in all these new movements the stimulus and leadership of the U. S. Public Health Service will play an important part. Problems of Training Health A meeting, called by the Federal Security Administrator, which dealt with the necessity of training large numbers of professional public health workers, was held in Washington, D. C., on January 8, Participants at the meeting were members of the staff of the Federal Security Agency (inclusive of officers of the U. S. Public Health Service), deans and faculty members of schools of public health, and the Chairman of the Executive Board of the American Public Health Association. Questions discussed were: 1. How much would the average annual training load have to be increased if future public health needs are to be met, and what proportion of the total average training load should be carried in the graduate programs of accredited schools of public health? 2. How wodld an increase in enrollment in the schools of public health affect the financial plight of the schools and what consequences might result if financial assistance were not extended to schools of public health? 3. What formula for federal aid to schools of public health should be devised (a. black grant; b. capitation; c. construction)? of Professional Public Workers 4. Since most public health workers prepare themselves for governmental positions not offering liberal remuneration, can recruitment for training be expected to be successful unless financial assistance is offered to the students? 5. What formula for direct aid to the students appears most appropriate (loans, scholarships, tuition, travel, stipend, grant)? 6. With changing horizons in public health, how should the present curricula of the schools be modified? It was agreed that during the next 10 years, an annual average of nearly 7,600 professional public health workers in the following categories must be trained: physicians, nurses, engineers and other sanitation personnel, dentists, health educators, laboratory workers, hospital and medical care administrators, nutritionists, and statisticians. It was further agreed that 29 per cent of the total number of 7,591 should be trained in the graduate programs of schools of public health (accredited by the American Public Health Association). The participants also approved formulae for aid to the schools and for the amount of fellowships to the various professional groups of public health trainees.