Strengthening wyoming's infrastructure and workforce - the wyoming department of health, public health division (WDH-PHD) is committed to protecting the health of wyoming communities and preventing…

Strengthening wyoming's infrastructure and workforce - the wyoming department of health, public health division (WDH-PHD) is committed to protecting the health of wyoming communities and preventing disease and injury. The strengthening U.S. Public health infrastructure, workforce, and data systems grant is a timely opportunity to support the division's post-pandemic efforts to reinvigorate the workforce. This project will allow the WDH-PHD to focus time and funding towards bolstering recruitment, hiring efforts, and retention efforts, particularly within the counties. IT will also strongly focus on retention as a way to encourage employees to remain with the WDH-PHD long term. These retention efforts may include a recognition program and a wellness program, as well as financial incentives, such as tuition assistance or loan reimbursement. Another primary focus of WDH-PHD is training. The division plans to not only train the workforce, but to also increase training capacity by training staff to become internal trainers. Staff will receive train-the-trainer opportunities in workforce development, administrative skills, and health equity. The WDH-PHD intends to evaluate and strengthen the overall systems, processes, and policies of the division, as well as pursue quality improvement projects that will improve overall operations to ensure a strong core infrastructure. This project will include an evaluation of internal processes, as well as assessing data informatics across the division. The evaluation will likely uncover a need for procuring or improving systems, which can be done through this project. Finally, the WDH-PHD has already begun to modernize the data systems, however this project will allow the division to leverage the funds and expand on the existing efforts. This will allow the WDH-PHD to ensure interoperability across statewide programs, creating a significant benefit to rural wyoming communities. Through this project, the WDH-PHD expects to reduce the number of vacant positions, increase retention of employees, enhance and procure data systems, modernize data systems, and increase interoperability. Ultimately, the WDH-PHD's primary outcome will be a strong public health infrastructure, an invigorated and highly trained workforce, and modern and efficient data systems that have bidirectional communication. These outcomes would benefit any state, but the impact IT can have in the rural state of wyoming is insurmountable.