Accreditation readiness and Quality Improvement Initiatives

The Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) accredited its first health departments in February 2013. Now there are more than 200 health departments voluntarily going through the process. As a learning organization, PHAB incorporated a multi-faceted evaluation plan into its work from the beginning as a means to improve its own services to health department applicants and site visitor volunteers and also to begin to respond to questions about the impact of accreditation. This session will provide early findings and results from the initial internal and external evaluations, as well as some of the impact stories from accredited health departments. The session will also provide information about the connection between PHAB’s accreditation impact results and results and data from related accreditation readiness initiatives sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. My talk with focus on how public health practice has been transformed as health departments pursue accreditation, or begin to realize that there are standards of performance, as demonstrated in the work supported by the RWJF.