Introduction. The tasks of preserving and strengthening public health, increasing life expectancy determine the importance of preventive work with the population. It is necessary to assess the "starting" conditions – the readiness of the existing system to implement new tasks. This explains the relevance of this study. Рurpose. Analysis of staffing of health centers of the Russian Federation in 2014-2018. Material and methods. Used data form No. 68 and No. 30 for 2014-2018. Methods: descriptive statistics, analytical. Results. As of the end of 2018, there are 760 health centers (НС) in the Russian Federation. The indicator of provision of the population with doctors of the НС in 2018 - 0,2 (2 times less than recommended), of the nurses – 0,3. More than 50% of the full-time НС positions are nurses who perform the bulk of manipulations and research (2018-53.9%). The share of posts of doctors from all regular made 35,7%. Staffing of staff positions was: doctors 69.3%, nurses -82.1%. There is a high proportion of part-timers, especially among doctors. Discussion and conclusions. Low rates of provision of the population with employees of the health centers are laid already at the stage of formation of the staffing table. The relatively low staffing levels and the high proportion of part-time staff contribute to the overall poor staffing picture. The staffing problem is compounded by the lack of an objective assessment of the time required for the provision of preventive services and, consequently, the lack of understanding of the real need for staff.