Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak with Dr. Dave Choxi, the New York City Health Commissioner and a primary care

doctor. The COVID-19 pandemic put an unprecedented strain

on public health departments from coast to coast,

testing public health workers of all backgrounds.

We talk about what we learned about the public health

workforce during the pandemic, and we

discussed the once-in-a-generation opportunity to put these lessons into action.

Let's listen.

Dr. Choxy, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the public health workforce.

I want to start with a pretty basic question. What do we mean by the public health workforce? Well, first, thanks for

having me on with you, Josh. I really appreciate it. And particularly on such an important

topic, the public health workforce, I'll start by saying, has been the unsung heroes of our

COVID-19 pandemic response. It involves both, you know, those groups of workers like

epidemiologists and disease detectives who have captured our imagination, but also so many

other people from community health workers to laboratory professionals to our public health sanitarians and inspectors who

...