Thirteenth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

Self-government administration in Poland consists of regional, local and municipal level units. The administration of all three levels is burdened with a range of responsibilities related to health, including health needs assessment, assuring access to health services and implementation of health policy interventions. This makes local administration a natural environment for public health workforce. We investigate the competence profile of local officers who are responsible for health-related tasks in Poland and verify if the competence profile correlates with the social and economic profile of the units and with how the unit engages in health-related tasks. We applied CAWI technique to collect data, having invited to participate all self-government units in Poland. We applied Pearson’s χ2, Kruskall-Wallis and Pearson’s correlation tests to examine the variable distribution and features of the investigated factors. Results. Initial results show that 22% of officers has public health related diploma. We found no difference between units’ profile or location. We found correlation between the number of public health trained workforce employed by the unit, and the number of health policy interventions the unit is implementing, as well as the financial engagement in health policy programmes implementation. The public health workforce remains highly underexploited in self-government administration in Poland. At the same time the units which tend to employ area-related specialists more willingly are more active in the field of public health. Legal solutions should create stronger incentives to engage public health specialists in the sphere of local health-related public governance.