William Schaffner, MD
William Schaffner
The program will integrate and be easier for all parties — for those who are training in infectious diseases who have a public health inclination, and also wish to be EIS officers with the CDC — to have an integrated application process that will make it much smoother for the applicant.
It will help the fellowship program attract people with those interests because obviously, the fellowships that want to do this have a public health interest already. It will help the state health departments, who have to compete periodically to attract EIS officers, because this is all going to be very integrated now. It’ll be less work for them. And obviously, it will be less work for the applicant.
The intention is to have these initial combined programs — the fellowship and the state health department that’s going to be their host during their 2 EIS years — located in the same city, so the applicants don’t have to move.
I can tell you that here at Vanderbilt, we have applied for one of these. We’re in Nashville —that’s the location of the state health department — and we have had a long association with our state health department. As a matter of fact, one of our recent fellow graduates went to the EIS and was assigned right here to the Tennessee health department. So, we actually have informally shown that this sort of thing can work.
It will help the CDC in one specific regard. If you look at the classes of EIS officers for the last 10-plus years, you will see that physicians are really a minority in those classes. You have lots of PhDs, epidemiologists, veterinarians, nurses — I think they even have a pharmacist now — but the EIS program has had difficulty recruiting doctors into that program. And, of course, we want that program to be enriched with doctors.
Originally when I was an EIS officer, which was back when the draft was active, we all had to fulfill our selective service obligations. One of the ways you could fulfill it was to earn a commission in the United States Public Health Service. I was fortunate enough to get in. The class was almost all doctors — not completely, but almost all — but that’s certainly changed over the decades.
As we train the next generation and the next generation of public health leaders, we want some physicians among them. This will help the EIS program in that regard.
William Schaffner, MD
Infectious Disease News Editorial Board Member
Professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Disclosures: Schaffner reports no relevant financial disclosures.
