Over the past 15 years, several large-scale efforts have significantly influenced local public health practice and moved it towards accreditation, including:
• The Ten Essential Services (Public Health in America)
• Measuring the performance of public health entities (National Public Health Performance Standards Program)
• Identifying components of public health systems
(The Future of Public Health and The Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century, both from the Institute of Medicine).
• Setting public health goals (Healthy People 2010)
All of these activities evolved in the absence of a commonly held notion of what constitutes a functional local health department. To that end, NACCHO developed an Operational Definition of a functional local governmental health department.
The Operational Definition
The Operational Definition is a shared understanding of what people in any community, regardless of size, can expect their governmental health department to provide at the local level. Based on the Ten Essential Public Health Services, and developed with extensive input from the public health community, the Operational Definition was cited as the framework for the local health department standards in the national accreditation program.
Exploring Accreditation Project
With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Exploring Accreditation Steering Committee and Workgroups undertook a year-long exploration to determine the feasibility and desirability of a voluntary national accreditation program for state and local public health departments. In September 2006, after extensive research and input from the field, the Steering Committee concluded that a voluntary national accreditation program for state and local public health departments is both feasible and desirable.
The Public Health Accreditation Board
Program implementation began in May 2007, when the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) was incorporated. PHAB is developing the national program for voluntary accreditation of local, Tribal and state health departments.
For more information about accreditation, visit the PHAB Web site at www.phaboard.org.
For more information about NACCHO's work around accreditation preparation, contact Jessica Solomon at jsolomon@naccho.org or 202-783-5550, Ext. 266.
