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Abstract:
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The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), an agency within the United States Department of Agriculture, is in charge of protecting the public's health by ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, and processed egg products. To help carry out this mission FSIS employs over 1,100 Public Health Veterinarians (PHVs). The main duties of a PHV involve enforcing regulations in meat and poultry facilities during live animal transport and handling, processing operations, and transportation and distribution of products. Over the past five years attrition has been high for PHVs. The main goal of this research was to determine if PHVs leaving FSIS share similar characteristics and if offering incentives could be used to lower the vacancy rate. Descriptive statistics, logistic regression, and survival analysis were used to examine PHVs over a ten year period. The adequacy of several survival analysis models were assessed on the proportional hazards assumption, diagnostic statistics measuring leverage and influence on fit, and summary measures of goodness-of-fit. The findings from these analyses were then used to model hiring scenarios offering incentives to reduce the vacancy rate.
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