While The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter takes a summer break, I decided to use this opportunity to share a resource that you might find helpful.
Are you sick and tired of being told to be resilient?
I sure am.
Over the past few years, I’ve lost count of the number of times public health professionals have been told to “be resilient.” Somewhere along the way, resilience has become the answer to every workforce challenge, as though a bubble bath or a mindfulness app could compensate for chronic underinvestment, institutional instability, or moral injury. (And don’t even get me started on the pizza party or the compulsory yoga session!)
But what if we’ve been asking the wrong question?
I’ve come to believe that resilience is not an action that we can simply expect individuals to perform. Telling one person to “be resilient” is a bit like telling them to stand in a circle. It’s something that only becomes possible through the systems we build, the leaders we follow, and the communities we create together.
So when the Region 2 Public Health Training Center invited me to speak about resilience in the public health workforce, I decided to challenge the premise instead.
What if resilience is not primarily an individual responsibility?
What if resilience is something that must be intentionally built into our organizations, our leadership, and our professional communities?
In this webinar, I argue that resilience cannot be understood simply as an individual trait. It must also be a property of the systems that we create. Public health professionals should not be expected to absorb endless instability, ethical distress, and institutional failure through ever greater personal resilience. Instead, we should be asking what resilient organizations, resilient leadership, and resilient public health systems actually look like.
Especially in the current climate, I believe that we need to become much more intentional about creating mechanisms for collective resilience. If you are reading this through The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter, you’ll already know that this is my endeavour to create a space where public health professionals can share their experiences, support one another, and recognize that we are not alone. The Public Health Connections Lounge is another such initiative to build community. I have plenty more ideas up my sleeve, and I’d love to hear yours.
Thankfully, the wonderful team at the Region 2 Public Health Training Center didn’t let my unbridled cynicism put them off. Instead, they welcomed exactly that conversation with remarkable openness. I’m especially grateful to Heather Krasna, Gabrielle Bailey, Nikki Durand, Christian Gloria, and the entire team for creating space for a discussion that challenged conventional thinking. It was also a pleasure to present alongside Terra Wagner, whose perspective on workforce wellbeing complemented my own beautifully.
🎥 Watch the webinar here. I’d genuinely love to hear what you think in the comments:
When you hear the word resilience, what is your reaction? Does it resonate with you or has it become overused?
Is there still a place for resilience, provided we redefine what we mean by it? What does it look like to you?
How should we respond when we see resilience used as a way of asking individuals to adapt to problems that really require action from institutions and leaders?
What could resilience look like if we stopped thinking about it as something individuals have to carry alone? What initiatives have you seen that build collective resilience within the public health workforce? Or what ideas do you have for other collective mechanisms of support?
As always, The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter exists to foster conversation and community. I’ll be reading your comments during my break, and I’m looking forward to continuing this discussion with you.
Like all the articles in The Public Health Workforce is Not OK newsletter, this one is not intended to be a monologue. This newsletter welcomes discussion, dialogue, disagreement, and amplification.
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If you would like to share your perspective on public health right now in this Newsletter written TO and FOR and BY and ABOUT the public health workforce, we are currently running three series:
📢 Voices from the Field: Meeting This Moment in Public Health
Opinion pieces grounded in lived experience💌 Love Letters to Public Health
Poetry, prose, visual art, or other creative formats🚪 Resignation Letters
Real or imagined correspondence documenting what is happening to our people and our institutions in real time
Please get in touch if you would like to submit a draft to any of these series. I will work closely with you to prepare it for publication. Review previous instalments for examples. I will offer you my personal promise of confidentiality if requested.
Lots more information on how to share your story is available here:
I close by emphasising what I said in a previous newsletter:
“At this time of uncertainty for the public health workforce, let’s remember our commitment to science and evidence and data. We know that validating emotions and baggage has a place too, but we need to be able to identify them and distinguish opinion from fact.
Let’s recommit to kindness and mutual support for the public health workforce and beyond. If leaders are trying to sow divisions among us, the best we can do is to respond with empathy, and by strengthening, connecting, and lifting up one another.
Right now, the best I can offer my fellow public health professionals is a place* to gather and reflect and share and vent and organize and ask questions and offer support to one another. We’re going to need that now more than ever.”
*This is a plug for the Public Health Connections Lounge on LinkedIn, where we seek to build community and conversation among public health professionals. Join us.
Public Health Connections Lounge
If you are new around here, Welcome to The Public Health Workforce is Not OK! In this newsletter, I share frank insights and start conversations about the experiences of building a public health career. You can get to know me here and here. Please subscribe, review the action steps and the archive, and join the conversations in the Lounge. I am committed to keeping this newsletter free for job seekers.
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