Enhancing the Public Health Assessment with the PACE-EH protocol in a Los Angleles County Community

Since 1990, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has been conducting public health assessments (PHA) at US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Superfund Sites through a cooperative agreement with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).  A PHA investigates past, present, and future health implications for local communities resulting from exposures to site-related contaminants. In several CDPH assessments, the local communities conveyed many non-site related environmental concerns. To address these concerns, CDPH modified the framework of its community outreach approach at two PHAs being conducted in the City of South Gate, a USEPA-recognized environmental justice community in Los Angeles County.

CDPH adopted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Protocol for Assessing Community Excellence in Environmental Health” (PACE-EH). PACE-EH is a procedure that motivates communities and local agencies to collaboratively explore, identify, and initiate action to improve their community.

Using the PACE-EH as a guide, CDPH promoted the development of a “Community Environmental Health Assessment Team” (CEHAT), a unified multi-agency and community-based group. The CEHAT collects the issues, devises policies, and facilitates the work to remedy the community’s environmental health concerns. It distributes a qualitative community survey to collect local environmental health concerns and uses this information to rank the concerns, create action steps, and manage improvements.

To the greatest extent possible, CDPH will integrate and evaluate the CEHAT’s conclusions into the PHAs or other related documents. PACE-EH expands the PHA process, activates the community, and increases CDPH’s capacity to address environmental health concerns in California.