Manuscripts submission deadline: September 30, 2024

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a lingering impact on the health care workforce, including dire shortages across all health care settings and disciplines. Addressing workforce shortages in correctional health care settings is especially challenging as workforce design and development issues specific to these settings have not been well explored in the literature. Data describing the U.S. correctional health care workforce and workforce shortages, overall or by discipline, are largely unavailable. Additionally, recruitment and retention of this specialty workforce is particularly challenging given the realities of correctional health care as well misconceptions about this field.

This special collection provides a forum for sharing information that describes the U.S. correctional health care workforce and highlights factors that contribute to or detract from effective workforce development. We seek to stimulate, disseminate, and accelerate innovative workforce practices in correctional health care settings. We hope that, drawing upon established evidence and emerging research, authors will generate recommendations for redesigning this workforce, improving recruitment and retention processes, and refocusing the organizational culture and academic partnerships to achieve better patient and population health outcomes. The goal is to develop a body of evidence that can be implemented, replicated, and built upon for correctional workforce development now and in the future.

We welcome manuscripts that contribute to the emerging evidence, provide models that can be replicated and evaluated for sustainable quality workforce development, and aim to advance the field through future, follow-up manuscripts.