231699 “Improving the nation's environmental health system: CDC's vision for the national Environmental Public Health Performance Standards (EnvPHPS)”

Tuesday, November 9, 2010 : 5:20 PM - 5:40 PM

Sharunda Buchanan, MS, PhD , Director, Division of Emergency and Environmental Health Services, CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, Atlanta, GA
Implementation of the national Environmental Public Health Performance Standards (EnvPHPS) across the country at the state, tribal, and local levels, will help NCEH build capacity, consistency, and accountability within and across the nation's environmental public health system. The EnvPHPS will be the primary tool to consistently and continuously assess the nation's environmental public health capacity of a state, tribal, or local jurisdiction to perform the essential services of environmental public health and to identify gaps in this capacity. EnvPHPS can be applied at the program, agency, or system level. NCEH will use information gathered via the EnvPHPS to target resources to the greatest needs. This continuous process of identifying service gaps and focusing resources on these priorities will strengthen the nation's environmental public health infrastructure. NCEH will use compiled capacity data from the self-assessment process to build an accurate picture of the challenges facing the nation's environmental public health services delivery system. The data collection will also provide information to Congress; federal, tribal, state, and local agencies; foundations; and universities on where to best focus resources for performance improvement. Departments that have used the standards have been recognized externally for their leadership and have demonstrated improvements in environmental health practice. Because the EnvPHPS were developed with a perspective of the broad system of environmental health practice, the standards can be applied within virtually all environmental health and protection programs whether or not those programs reside in health departments.

Learning Areas:
Administration, management, leadership
Conduct evaluation related to programs, research, and other areas of practice
Environmental health sciences
Program planning
Public health or related organizational policy, standards, or other guidelines
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
1) Participants will be able to describe the vision and strategy of the CDC Emergency and Environmental Health Services Division in addressing inequities in the nation’s environmental health services system. 2) Participants will be able to explain the role of the Environmental Public Health Performance Standards as a key tool in helping local, state, and tribal agencies assess opportunities to improve performance and more effectively address community environmental health issues.

Keywords: Environmental Health, Performance Measurement

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the director of CDC's Division of Emergency and Environmental Health Services, which helped develop the Environmental Public Health Performance Standards.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.