Oral

Excellent environmental health programs have the capacity to perform all ten of the essential environmental public health services (EssEPHS), which are essential to improved health and reduced risk. The National Environmental Public Health Performance Standards (NEPHPS) were developed to provide state, tribal, and local environmental health programs with an instrument that allows them to easily assess their capacity to perform the EssEPHS. The NEPHPS complement the National Public Health Performance Standards. Environmental health programs can use the NEPHPS standards to measure their performance and identify capacity gaps needing improvement. The session will include presentations on why and how the standards were developed, how they can be used to improve program performance, a review of the standards, presentations by jurisdictions which have used them to make improvements,and the national vision for using the standards to improve capacity, consistency, and accountability within and across the nation's environmental health system.

Session Objectives: 1. Understand the value of the National Environmental Public Health Performance Standards and how they can be used to improve performance resulting in reduced risk and improved health. 2. List at least three resources for conducting an assessment and implementing an action plan to improve agency capacity. 3. Describe how the NEPHPS have been used to obtain improvements in state, tribal, or local programmatic settings.

CE Credits: CME, Health Education (CHES), Nursing