Task 8

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Module 3 — Task 8: Select Standards Against Which Local Status Can Be Compared

At the completion of this task, the assessment team should have:

Appropriate standards—national, state, local, and community-driven—against which environmental health status can be compared.

The next step is to determine what the indicators tell about the relative status of the community’s environmental health. Standards, or benchmarks, provide a point of comparison for the community’s environmental health status. They may come from the state or national level, from a peer community, or from the community itself as it seeks to document attainment of goals over time.

Click the following links to skip to each section:

»	Identify Externally Driven Standards
»	Agree upon Locally Appropriate Standards

Identify Externally Driven Standards

As with indicators, there are no nationally agreed-upon standards for local environmental health status. Two widely used standards in the public health community are:

Additionally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed environmental goals and benchmarks for 2005 (U.S. EPA, 1996). Although these publications may be helpful for broad community health application, neither is particularly robust in environmental health or reflective of community-developed priorities. In the absence of other standards, these resources may be useful in providing a national context.

Agree upon Locally Appropriate Standards

Listen to Susan Sutherland (Delaware, OH) discuss the importance of developing standards.

Ideally, standards used to interpret local status (and benchmarks used to track progress) should reflect community-based goals and values. Community-driven standards can be derived from the work completed in Tasks 7 and 9. The assessment team can review the selected indicators, irrespective of existing data, and agree upon acceptable or desired data points to describe the issue. These then become standards that can be used (in Task 9) to determine whether actual community data calls for significant attention to be paid to the issue. Similarly, indicators complete with data representing current status can serve as benchmarks (or starting points) against which progress over time can be demonstrated. These can be used to determine if public health protection factors or other intervention activities are, in fact, effective.

Note: A local standard is not an end in itself. It can, and should, be changed over time as a community’s environmental health status changes.

Questions to consider

Why is it important to select standards or benchmarks? What is one of the most widely used external standard? What is a widely used source for national EH standards? and Why should EH standards reflect community-based goals and values?