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

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

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

Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call.

Today, the public health workforce.

This sector is facing high turnover, big objectives, and shrinking budgets, and an increasingly hostile environment where

rhetoric has turned violent in some cases. Beth Resnick and Tara Kirksell returned to the podcast

to talk about what the data is showing about the current climate, the Bloomberg

School's Flaggett system, which connects researchers with public safety experts who can help

them deal with harassment and threats, and how we can all support each other in this moment.

Let's listen.

Beth Resnick and Tara Kirksell, we're so happy to have both of you back on public health on call. Today we're

talking about the safety and security of the public health workforce, and this is a really

multifaceted conversation. I want to first start off by asking both of you about your

backgrounds in this work. So, Beth, let's start with you. Yeah, great. Thank you, Lindsay. Wonderful

to be here with you today. So my connection to this, particularly during COVID, I did a lot of research around harassment of public health officials that clearly spiked during COVID, where we had over 1,500 incidents, even within the first few months of COVID. But I wanted to also just put it in the context of my larger research, which is around the

public health workforce overall. And do they have enough infrastructure, support, and protection?

Because clearly, if you're overstretched and you don't have enough people or you don't have

the capacity to do the job, that adds additional stress and burden on these workers.

And I've been looking at that for many years,

including budget cutbacks during the Great Recession and we had so many losses of jobs. And then

...