Public Health Accreditation and Environmental Health

In September 2011, the first ever national public health department voluntary accreditation program was launched. . The program’s goal is to advance the quality and performance of public health departments. The program intends to strengthen health departments’ internal procedures and the services they provide, leading to a more robust public health infrastructure nationwide.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) co-funded the national accreditation program’s development and startup. Key national partners, some of whom represent constituencies the program will accredit, also supported the program’s development. The Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) was incorporated in May 2007 as a nonprofit organization to serve as the accrediting body. Since then, PHAB has provided leadership for the program’s development and startup.

Collaboration between PHAB and its critical partners and constituencies has been an important aspect of these efforts, and PHAB’s work with the environmental public health community has been a successful initial example of such collaboration. The National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) and the Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support (OSTLTS) at CDC work with many partners to strengthen the nation’s public health infrastructure and to improve environmental public health practice. To this end, PHAB, NCEH, and OSTLTS worked together to explore how the PHAB standards can best relate to environmental public health (EPH) and how EPH staff can become involved in accreditation. This resulted in numerous actions that have measurably enhanced the visibility and accuracy of EPH within the accreditation process and standards.

This session will briefly review the EPH involvement in the Accreditation process. The speakers will show what has been learned in the initial phase of testing of the Accreditation Standards and in the actual Accrediting process. The session will update participants on what is likely to occur in this evolving field, where in-depth analysis of services and programs reveals areas for continuous quality improvement within environmental public health agencies.