Georgia Needs More Than Doctors and Nurses. Augusta University Is Building a New Public Health Workforce Pipeline.

AUGUSTA, Ga. Georgia's healthcare workforce conversation usually starts with doctors and nurses.

Augusta University is building a new undergraduate pathway around the people who work farther upstream: preventing disease, analyzing population health, preparing communities for emergencies and designing the systems that influence health before a patient reaches an exam room.

Following approval by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, Augusta University's School of Public Health is preparing to launch its first undergraduate degree program: a Bachelor of Science in Public Health.

The program is scheduled to begin in fall 2027.

This is the School of Public Health's first undergraduate degree

The School of Public Health already operates graduate and research programs, but the new BSPH creates an entry point for students beginning at the undergraduate level.

Augusta University says the degree is designed for students interested in careers connected to community health, public service, disease prevention, health management, informatics, social and behavioral sciences and related fields.

It can also serve as preparation for students who later pursue clinical careers such as medicine, dentistry or nursing.

The degree is built around 120 credit hours and real-world experience

Augusta University's program page says students will complete 120 credit hours.

The curriculum includes core requirements, major coursework and electives, plus a required internship and capstone sequence.

Students will study subjects including health policy, epidemiology, sociology and global health, while experiential options include community health promotion, disaster preparedness and population-health research.

That structure is designed to move the degree beyond classroom theory and into practical work with real public-health challenges.

Public health sits between medicine and community infrastructure

A physician may treat one patient with hypertension. Public-health professionals may ask why hypertension is concentrated in a particular neighborhood, whether residents have access to healthy food, whether preventive care is reaching them and which interventions actually change outcomes across thousands of people.

A hospital treats people after a disaster. Public-health workers can help plan evacuation, communication, disease surveillance and community response before and during the event.

That difference in scale is why the workforce includes people working in government agencies, healthcare systems, nonprofits, research, data analysis, policy and community organizations.

Augusta is an especially logical place to build the pipeline

Augusta University sits at the intersection of higher education, research and clinical healthcare.

The School of Public Health says its enrollment has grown to more than 300 students since the school opened, while sponsored research funding has increased substantially since 2023.

The new undergraduate program connects that growing public-health operation to Augusta University's broader ecosystem of clinical and health-sciences programs.

For students, that can create opportunities to see public health not as an isolated discipline but as part of a larger healthcare system.

This is workforce development too

Public-health degrees are sometimes discussed primarily as academic programs.

But Augusta University explicitly frames the BSPH as preparation for work in local, state and federal agencies, regional health systems, nonprofits and private healthcare settings.

That makes the launch part of a broader Georgia workforce story.

The state needs people who can treat individual patients. It also needs people who can analyze data, manage programs, coordinate community interventions and respond when health challenges affect entire populations.

The Georgia inside the story

Georgia's healthcare needs are not limited to the number of hospital beds or physicians in a county.

They also include prevention, planning, education, data, emergency response and the systems that connect communities to care.

The Georgia inside this story is that building a healthier state requires a workforce beyond the bedside. Augusta University is creating an undergraduate pipeline for students who may spend their careers working on the health of entire communities rather than one patient at a time.