Workforce, Networks & HSR Journal
Dear Friends & Colleagues,
I am just back from a trip to Atlanta for a conference put on by the Office of Workforce and Career Development at the CDC. Carol Crawford heads is the Director for Science in that unit. The conference was focused on workforce, but brought a series of folks with social sciences backgrounds from disparate areas to talk about their work with workforce, and to help those of us from the public health side of the house think outside the box on looking at public health workforce. We, at UK, have established a good relationship with that office and I believe some good collaboration is likely to be forthcoming.
I ran into several colleagues in Atlanta, as you might imagine, Kris Gebbie, the reigning guru of public health workforce was there. She tells me she is leaving Columbia to be a dean! I did a mini mental status exam and found no obvious explanation for her obvious temporary loss of her senses. I wish her the best. Mike Meit, who has been in the blog before was also there, Mike is at the Walsh Rural Research Center at NORC, and is doing some good work on rural public health. He is in Lexington this week talking about his work with drug abuse in the Kentucky mountains, but will be meeting with us at UK to talk about rural public health work at NORC and some potential collaboration.
Those who were asked to submit a full proposal for the public health practice based research networks that our colleague Glen Mays from Arkansas is responsible for are busy trying to get final proposals to him by early September. It looks like he and his colleagues will choose some five networks as the founding set. Glen tells me that there will be ten more next year, so the competition is not over. He has been circumspect about the news, but now will have more to say as these first five are rolled out. Watch his component of the PHSSR web site for news and information as this initiative moves forward.
We continue to be busy, Glen Mays, Debra Perez and Nicki Lurie, who are working on the supplemental issue of HSR on PHSSR. I have been getting good inquiries and it looks like we will have a number of good manuscripts submitted for review. I am delighted that so many good folks are working in the area and are ready to publish. It is the sign of a growing and prosperous research field. My thanks too for those who are submitting manuscripts, you are the ones that are making the field go.
Till next time.