Working Together to Enhance Public Health Capacity in Communities

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry (NCEH/ATSDR) is committed to working with its federal partners, states, universities, and others to help build and enhance environmental public health capacity in communities, especially in communities with the most need. NCEH/ATSDR has a long history of strengthening environmental public health services in states and communities and will highlight some of those successes in this presentation. Recently, NCEH/ATSDR and EPA formed an interagency collaborative to specifically develop a preventative health and protection model to support sustainable community-based activities. As such, this session will highlight progress made by the collaborative, as well as offer additional avenues of engagement by community leaders to take the helm in developing foundational and cross-cutting public health capacity. Additionally, this presentation will also highlight new steps taken by CDC to meet community health challenges in the 21st century by reviewing CDC's Health Protection Goals and objectives that target improvements in community health and risk reduction. NCEH/ATSDR supports and will discuss the premise that working together to foster improved relationships between public health and environmental agencies and the community will result in greater community effectiveness.