The U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Commissioned Corps set deployment records during the pandemic, with officers dispatched globally and the small corps raising its profile among Americans unfamiliar with its mission to protect our nation’s health and safety.  

While COVID-related demands have subsided, the service’s work has not. 

These 5,500 officers face a growing mission set and new duties at home and abroad. Working across 11 professional categories, these officers have responded to natural disasters like Hawaii’s deadly wildfires; humanitarian missions like Operation Allies Welcome to support vulnerable Afghans resettling across the U.S. and homeland security and safety missions along our borders. And they are training and prepping for the next disease outbreak.  

Complicating matters, the service continues to function without a dedicated budget for operations and maintenance. It seeks to grow its force strength by 500 before the end of the year without a dedicated recruiting budget. And its Ready Reserve has stalled, with 95 inactive members; a goal of 400 reservists remains out of reach without government funding. 

[RELATED: Public Health Service Officers, Advocates Team Up to Support Ready Reserve]

Public Health Service leaders recognize the challenges ahead but speak confidently of their hardworking officers and family support. MOAA is also providing support, calling on Congress to fund the service and its reserve.  

Rear Adm. Denise Hinton, deputy surgeon general, and Rear Adm. Rick Schobitz, director of Commissioned Corps Headquarters, sat down with MOAA to discuss the state of their service, timed to the service’s 226th anniversary.  

Interview excerpts, edited for space and clarity: 

Q: Can you talk about some of your growing missions that maybe aren't on the public radar? 

Hinton: The Public Health Service Commissioned Corps gained a lot of exposure and attention during the pandemic, and I think that's mainly because of the indelible impact that we had on the health of the nation. We had a historic number of deployments. 

Schobitz: Two areas of growth that I've seen over the last two years that I'd like to point out – one would be behavioral health. The second would be our engineering and environmental health officer deployments. 

We have a strong contingent of behavioral health providers on our staff. Often, we send a behavioral health response team to communities after a disaster. 

And right now, we have a lot of demand for both environmental health and engineering resources. One demand in particular is to meet the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native Alaskan communities in terms of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. A lot of people don't know that there are Native American communities that don't have access to drinking water that is safe to drink without boiling. We are working directly in partnership with the Indian Health Service to work on those projects and increase the pipeline of available expertise to make sure that we can continue that work into the future. 

Q: What's causing the increased need in these areas? 

Schobitz: With behavioral health, we as a nation are starting to acknowledge behavioral health needs a little bit differently than we did in the past. I think it's OK now to seek help when needed. 

You also see large-scale efforts from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense, and Department of Health and Human Services. 

Hinton: We work to support missions across the world. One, to advance, protect, and promote the health and safety of our nation. Two, to help communities thrive. We have officers who provide support to ensure food safety and access to improved waste management and focus on preventing disease outbreaks.

We have Public Health Service officers that are part of the Epidemiologic Intelligence Service, or EIS, that are trained to go out to investigate to see where the host environments are and focus efforts on prevention, treatment, and what interventions might be needed. 

And they do this as a part of our joint service work with other federal agencies and our DoD counterparts as well. 

[FROM 2021: USPHS Officers on the COVID-19 Fight]  

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the U.S. border missions public health officers fulfill?  

Schobitz: Right now we're working with the United States Coast Guard on Operation Vigilant Sentry, where we have officers providing direct medical and behavioral health care, sometimes shipboard and sometimes on land, mainly in Florida, to those that are seeking to make it to our country. 

The Coast Guard identifies families that are trying to make it to the coast but are struggling. They then intercede and save the families. And then our officers, along with their Coast Guard partners, provide that medical and behavioral health support.  

Another critical piece of that mission is the toll that it takes on the Coast Guard officers. And we're there to respond to their behavioral health needs, too, because sometimes those families are found in very challenging circumstances. 

We also support the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Immigration Health Service Corps in a number of their facilities where individuals are processed that are trying to come to the country. 

Our officers provide the immediate assessment and care, often running 24/7 operations across the border. 

[RELATED: USPHS Officer, MOAA Life Member Reflects on the Battle Against COVID-19]

Q: Can you describe the ways Public Health officers serve alongside the other branches of service?  

Hinton: We by statute provide clinical support to the servicemembers within the Coast Guard and those that are serving on the cutters and the like, and NOAA Corps.  

Our collaboration does ensure that both the Coast Guard and NOAA Corps meet their operational readiness requirements. We also have officers stationed at NORTHCOM and SOUTHCOM.  

Schobitz: We've had a memorandum of agreement with the DoD where we provide officers opportunities to work directly in their medical treatment facilities. We've expanded that recently to include officers on our Public Health Emergency Response Strike Team, or PHERST. 

We're also increasing our opportunities to train alongside the DoD, and with Army, Air Force, and Navy active duty and reserve component officers and sometimes National Guard, too. 

It’s an innovative readiness training, where they serve communities that are underserved for their health care, and the teams come together to provide that medical care in an interservice manner, free for the community, and [the servicemembers] get those reps. 

We have officers assigned to the U.S. Army that attend the Army Command and General Staff College, the Army War College, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. 

Hinton: We’ll just continue to foot stomp that the big focus is on enhancing medical readiness.  

I don't think folks always recognize we are seated along our other joint services, fulfilling whatever work is needed. Counterterrorism, bioterrorism. There’s lot of work that's focused in the suburban areas on chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear threats.  

Q: Can you describe what a strike team is? How big is it, and how is it used? 

Schobitz: PHERST is a group of officers who rapidly deploy to regional, national, and global emergencies. We are building five teams of 16 PHERST officers that currently work at DoD military treatment facilities. They vary in skills to provide clinical, safety, and behavioral health support throughout the facilities.  One out of every five months, a team is on call. When they're on call, they're expected to be able to deploy within 24 hours in support of disasters, emergencies, or urgent public health needs. 

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Q: Can we talk about force size? You’re at about 5,500 right now. Is that where you want to be? Do you have the authority to grow? 

Schobitz: We have the authority to grow, and we want to grow.  We are working towards growth. Unlike the other services, we don't have dedicated recruiters, nor do we have a dedicated recruiting budget. 

So our officers are charged with telling our story. It's critical to get the word out about what we're doing. 

We are finding ways to recruit. We are working with a number of universities and having U.S. Public Health Service days. We have other university events coming up all year round, and given that we don't have a recruiting budget, we rely on our officers that are local in the area and our retirees, which I like to call our alumni. 

Hinton: Our goal is to get to 6,000 officers by the end of the calendar year and continuously expand each year. 

We work across 11 professional categories: dietitian, dentist, engineer, environmental health, health services, nurse, pharmacist, physician, scientist, therapist, and veterinarian. We need more clinicians. We need more nurses, nurse practitioners with behavior health experience, engineers, and those with environmental health experience, to name a few. 

We need a line-item budget to be able for that to happen. We're committed to improving our services across recruitment and retention. 

Our focus is to continue to grow and continue to get the parity needed for the other services.  

Q: You mentioned retention. Can you deliver a message to the folks reading this who are in the service today?  

Hinton: We’re a community at large, serving across the nation and the globe to protect, promote, and advance the health and safety of the nation. Wherever there's an interest, I can almost guarantee that our service has a value. We’re working to expand the USPHS Commissioned Corps and make it the strongest possible. 

Schobitz: Our officers provide critical services in our communities, and we're proud of their work and the dedication they give daily to our mission and our nation. We're proud of our families, too. 

Our families sacrifice a lot, and so I think as leaders we're looking to provide the best possible support to our officers and our families. 

Hinton: We want to make sure our officers have parity in terms of all of the benefits that the other uniformed services have, and we're always working to achieve that parity and provide the best support possible. 

And we want to make sure we mention our Ready Reserve officers. Our reservists are a key part of our service, and you know what we're fighting for as far as parity for them, but also funding to be able to keep them on board and continue to grow. 

At the heart of the USPHS Commissioned Corps lies four core values-leadership, service, integrity and excellence. We are grateful for the trailblazers who paved the way and serve as examples of these core values in action.