#IPHI CASE INTERVIEWER HOW TO#

Staff demonstrate these new skills through role playing of interviews and group discussions on how to handle challenging scenarios. The didactic portions of the training cover topics such as motivational interviewing, social determinants of health and cultural humility. New staff have the opportunity to learn through a mix of didactic and interactive sessions. Roughly 20 percent of IPHI’s deployed workforce is comprised of community health workers.Ī health equity lens is also woven throughout our training modules. There are more than 60 languages represented across IPHI employees to support the Fairfax County contact tracing efforts for non-English speaking Fairfax residents. To reflect the makeup of the community, we prioritized hiring a diverse workforce representing various races, ethnicities, and nationalities similar to the residents who live within the bounds of Fairfax County, specifically from Latinx and African American communities which have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. We partnered with TalentBoost, an innovative staff recruitment business that impressed us with their work rapidly ramping up the COVID-19 contact tracing workforce in Massachusetts. What does it mean to use an equity lens to recruit, hire, train, and retain a new segment of the public health workforce to respond to COVID-19? Due to the critical support and capacity IPHI provided, we were able to focus on our role leading the Emergency Response.” - Gloria Addo-Ayensu, MD, MPH, Director of Health for Fairfax County Recruiting, employing and training hundreds of staff in just a few short months was no small feat. “IPHI is an essential partner in the Health Department’s efforts to contain COVID-19 in Fairfax County. We were selected to recruit, hire, train, and provide technical assistance, human resources support and project management for this expanded segment of the public health workforce due to our collaborative and innovative nature, our focus on health equity, integrity, our genuine connections to communities in the region, and our ability to stand-up a new program (i.e., operationally from hiring, training to implementation, and performance improvement) quickly and cost-effectively. The Fairfax County Health Department sought a partner to build a COVID-19 response workforce that included case investigators, contact tracers, community health workers, epidemiologists, data and environmental health specialists, and supervisors/managers to lead the county’s pandemic response. How did the partnership between IPHI and the Fairfax County Health Department begin?

We spoke with Carolyn Padovano, PhD, RN, Senior Director and Christine Stewart, MPH, Program Manager at IPHI to learn more about their health equity centered training program for case investigators and contact tracers. And while some of these temporary employees have left for permanent positions elsewhere, IPHI reports a monthly attrition rate of less than five percent across these new, temporary roles, a credit to not just effective hiring practices, but also strong training and staff support. Fairfax County established a partnership with IPHI to hire and train contact tracers and other public health workers.Īs of March 1, 2021, IPHI had received nearly 15,000 applications for over 500 positions they’ve hired over 650 employees over the last nine months. Some health departments, like the Fairfax County Health Department in Northern Virginia, drew on local public health organizations, including the Institute for Public Health Innovation (IPHI), which is the public health institute that serves Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

While thousands of public health workers pivoted to respond to the pandemic, still thousands more workers were needed to address the current and rising health demands in a country where there was already a shortage of public health and health care workers. Elevate: Your Resource for Lifelong LearningĪs the pandemic bore down on the nation, health departments across the country grappled with an exponential demand for public health services like COVID-19 testing, contact tracing, and other emergency response activities.Regional Public Health Training Centers.National Coordinating Center for Public Health Training (NCCPHT).

Iphi case interviewer