Commentary: developing and retaining a public health workforce for the 21st century: readiness for a paradigm shift to community-based public health.

The Partnership for the Public's Health work in supporting partnerships between local health departments and community-based organizations has offered important insights into the difficulties of changing public health practice to a more community-based model. Keys to these difficulties are workforce issues: availability, appropriateness of initial training, recruitment, retention, and issues of continuing education. These challenges and some positive examples are discussed.