Yesterday, Colorado US Senator Michael Bennet and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) announced legislation to create the Health Force, which would recruit, train, and employ hundreds of thousands of Americans to expand our public health workforce for the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) response and strengthen our capacity to meet America’s longer-term public health needs.
As the United States battles COVID-19 and begins plans to reopen the economy, Bennet, Gillibrand, and a group of their Senate colleagues announced one of the most ambitious and expansive public health campaigns in the nation’s history. The Health Force would provide jobs for thousands of recently unemployed Americans and directly support the nation’s efforts to recover from the current crisis.
“This crisis is the greatest challenge our country has faced since World War II. And we can – and must – rise to the challenge with a broad and bold proposal to combat the virus and put our economy back to work at the same time,” said Bennet. “Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration mobilized millions of Americans during one of the most trying times in our nation’s history, our new Health Force will help bolster the COVID-19 response and put Americans back to work serving their communities and their country. We need ideas as big as the challenge we face, and the Health Force meets that test.”
The Health Force is inspired by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, which similarly tapped the unemployed to help the nation recover from a sharp economic downturn. The Health Force would create a federally-supported and locally-managed program to train and deploy essential public and community health frontline workers, who could conduct testing, contact tracing, or eventual vaccine administration. These positions would complement America’s highly trained and skilled medical professionals already fighting on the front lines. The workforce would be trained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and managed by state and local public health agencies across the country.
The Health Force would be responsible for:
- Conducting contact tracing;
- Administering COVID-19 tests, including antibody tests;
- Providing COVID-19 vaccinations (when available);
- Sharing COVID-19 public health messages with community members, including debunking myths and misperceptions;
- Providing data entry in support of epidemiological surveillance and to meet broader health information system requirements;
- Providing community-based and home-based services, including food and medical supply delivery to elderly and immunocompromised individuals;
- Providing palliative and hospice care;
- Providing other public health-related services, as needed.
In Colorado, public health and human services are decentralized, placing a greater burden at the local level to create financial resources and trained health care workers. The Health Force would directly support the work of local agencies by giving young people the opportunity to fill the specific jobs different counties need while earning an income and building new skills. Colorado’s local health departments would benefit from a surge of support for services like contact tracing and infection control to food delivery for seniors and child care support.
After the current public health crisis concludes, the Health Force would provide grant funding and technical assistance to state and local health departments to hire and retain members to serve as health extension workers (HEWs) among vulnerable populations, in underserved areas and in future public health emergencies. These activities could include sharing public health messages with community members, providing home-based check-ins for seniors and new mothers and infants, providing vaccination schedule reminders for parents of children, connecting community members with health-related services (e.g. SNAP), and more.
The Health Force will be a new component of the CDC Public Health Emergency Preparation (PHEP) which include 65 jurisdictions across all 50 states, territories, and tribal lands. The CDC will develop and implement Health Force training packages, while state, local, territorial, and tribal funding recipients will hire, supervise, and retain Force members using new grant or cooperative agreement funding provided through PHEP and/or Public Health Crisis Response (PHCR). States, localities, territories, and tribal entity funding recipients will actively recruit and manage Force members. Recruitment will reach out to low-income, minority, and historically marginalized populations.
This legislation also includes the Resiliency Force, a proposal led by U.S. Senators Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), that mobilizes individuals at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the fight against the coronavirus by providing funding needed to hire and train 62,000 additional FEMA Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) to perform public health and related functions as well as respond to natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires. Along with the CDC, FEMA is a key part of the whole-of-government effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and responsibly reopen the country in phases. However, FEMA’s workforce of approximately 14,000 must be significantly expanded to address the growing national needs of testing, and managing emergency supply chain logistics for states and communities in need.
This is the second of three proposals under development by a working group of Senate Democrats to address the urgent need to expand the public health and response workforce during and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier today, a Senate Democratic working group led by US Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) released the Pandemic Response and Opportunity Through National Service Act, which would fund 750,000 national service positions over a three-year response and recovery period.