Journal article
Tackling brain drain at Chinese CDCs: understanding job preferences of public health doctoral students using a discrete choice experiment survey
- Abstract:
-
BackgroundGiven the demands for public health and infectious disease management skills during COVID-19, a shortage of the public health workforce, particularly with skills and competencies in epidemiology and biostatistics, has emerged at the Centers for Disease Controls (CDCs) in China. This study aims to investigate the employment preferences of doctoral students majoring in epidemiology and biostatistics, to inform policy-makers and future employers to address recruitment and retention requirements at CDCs across China.MethodsA convenience sampling approach for recruitment, and an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey instrument to elicit future employee profiles, and self-report of their employment and aspirational preferences during October 20 and November 12, 2020. Attributes included monthly income, employment location, housing benefits, children’s education opportunities, working environment, career promotion speed and bianzhi (formally established post).ResultsA total of 106 doctoral epidemiology and biostatistics students from 28 universities completed the online survey. Monthly income, employment location and bianzhi was of highest concern in the seven attributes measured, though all attributes were statistically significant and presented in the expected direction, demonstrating preference heterogeneity. Work environment was of least concern. For the subgroup analysis, employment located in a first-tier city was more likely to lead to a higher utility value for PhD students who were women, married, from an urban area and had a high annual family income. Unsurprisingly, when compared to single students, married students were willing to forgo more for good educational opportunities for their children. The simulation results suggest that, given our base case, increasing only monthly income from 10,000 ($ 1449.1) to 25,000 CNY ($ 3622.7) the probability of choosing the job in the third-tier city would increase from 18.1 to 53.8% (i.e., the location choice is changed).ConclusionMonthly income and employment location were the preferred attributes across the cohort, with other attributes then clearly ranked and delineated. A wider use of DCEs could inform both recruitment and retention of a public health workforce, especially for CDCs in third-tier cities where resource constraints preclude all the strategies discussed here.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.3MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1186/s12960-022-00743-y
Authors
+ National Natural Science Foundation of China
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/01h0zpd94
- Grant:
- 72074047
- Publisher:
- BioMed Central
- Journal:
- Human Resources for Health More from this journal
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 46
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2022-05-23
- Acceptance date:
- 2022-05-13
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1478-4491
- Pmid:
-
35606873
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1262828
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1262828
- Deposit date:
-
2024-12-06
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Liu et al
- Copyright date:
- 2022
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record