NACCHO Consulting

The NACCHO Consulting team has practical experience helping local health departments achieve their missions. We offer customized capacity building services, training, and technical assistance to local public health departments and other public health entities to help them create healthy, resilient, and equitable communities. We build relationships with our clients and are passionate about generating solutions to solve tough problems.

Let’s create a healthy, resilient, and equitable community together. What are your top challenges? NACCHO Consulting can help. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

We make the results of any investigation or program evaluation useful, offering practical assistance to help you implement and share the things you learn.

Is your program performing well? Are you meeting the goals and getting the outcomes you expected? How do you know? Our program evaluation experts can help you with all aspects of evaluation, from program design to data analysis and dissemination. We can create logic models that effectively communicate your program’s goals, as well as focuses the evaluation and your program to avoid “scope creep.” We can provide evidence collection techniques using both quantitative and qualitative measures, data analysis support to justify conclusions, and results dissemination strategies focused on both written documents and data visualization to ensure your program’s story is easily conveyed and understood.

Our evaluations are tailored and unique to your program so that recommendations are usable and real. We make sure that evaluation results and recommendations can be easily incorporated to shape, improve, and transform your program for greater effectiveness.

Do your surveys suffer from poor performance, such as low response rates? Are your surveys not quite collecting the data that you need or expect? Our consultants can help you design a survey that is clear, effective, and efficient to improve response rates and gather reliable data. We have the expertise to help you identify potential participants, select an unbiased sample, collect responses, and prepare analysis-ready data that is representative of the target population in which you are interested.

Our team uses state-of-the-art web-based software that allows most surveys to be viewed on mobile devices. We are flexible enough to work with alternative means, such as paper-and-pencil or in-person interviews, in order to best meet your needs. Our consultants have a solid understanding of the ethics of surveying and will maintain the confidentiality of your respondents. We have a long-standing trust and success with the organizations we have served.

Do you experience challenges with designing research studies? Are you unsure about the appropriate methods for analyzing data? Our Ph.D.-trained statisticians can help you with all of your research design and data analysis needs! From the simple to complex, we can provide data analysis techniques and tools to help you drill down, explore, and track both quantitative and qualitative data. We have expertise in various qualitative methods, including key informant interviews and focus groups. Our researchers have successfully conducted research studies and disseminated results to a variety of audiences, including publishing in peer-reviewed journals. We ensure that the research methods help you uncover the meaning and value behind data.

We work with teams to function more efficiently, improve their processes, and implement plans to create a healthier community.

Are you leaping to action? Are you analyzing your system prior to making decisions? Adaptive Leadership is a practical framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and succeed in challenging environments. It increases the ability, both individually and collectively, to take on the gradual but meaningful process of change. Adaptive Leadership was developed by Drs. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at the Harvard Kennedy School and was designed to identify and deal with consequential change in uncertain times. The concepts and principles of Adaptive Leadership have broad applications in the field of public health. The framework can be beneficial in managing organizational change, implementing community health improvement planning, developing leadership and workforce, strengthening community partnerships, and navigating changing political, social and economic climates.

Are you working in ambiguity? Are external decisions and changes affecting how you do your work? Our change management experts support teams in selecting strategies to facilitate the transition of individuals, teams, or organizations from a current state of operation to the new, desired state. More specifically, it involves a process and set of techniques to manage the feelings, perceptions, and reactions of the people affected by the change being introduced. The impetus of any organizational change initiative is to improve some aspect of operations or longer term outcomes. Change projects result in new policies, processes, protocols, or systems to which staff must become accustomed, and NACHO consultants facilitate change management techniques to support teams through the transition.

Are your partners working toward the same community vision? Do data inform your strategies for making a healthier community? Are community members engaged in improving the community? Our community health assessment and improvement planning experts work with communities to create a community-wide strategic plan. We lay the foundation for prioritizing resources and activities. Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) is a community-driven strategic planning process for improving community health and results in a community health assessment and improvement plan. We provide training in MAPP and offer facilitation of the six phases. We also support communities in training for one or more particular aspects of the MAPP process, such as partnership and community engagement.

Is your performance system integrated? Are individual performance plans tied to the organizational objectives? Our performance management experts train teams in implementing an integrated performance management system that includes:

1) Setting organizational objectives across all levels of the department,

2) Identifying indicators to measure progress toward achieving objectives on a regular basis,

3) Identifying responsibility for monitoring progress and reporting, and

4) Identifying areas where achieving objectives requires focused quality improvement processes. We offer training in performance management and facilitate agencies in identifying appropriate performance measures, tying individual level performance measures up to community – level measures.

Are you improving how you do your work? Are your tracking processes? Are you testing hypothesis to improve outcomes? Our quality improvement experts use deliberate and defined improvement process, such as Plan-Do-Check-Act, which is focused on activities that are responsive to community needs and improving population health. We support teams in continuous and ongoing efforts to achieve measurable improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, performance, accountability, outcomes, and other indicators of quality in services or processes which achieve equity and improve the health of the community. We train in quality improvement tools and techniques and facilitate QI projects.

Is your agency working on the right strategies? Do you know where you want to be in three years? Are teams working together on a common goal? We provide training in strategic planning as well as facilitating strategic planning and action planning process. The key steps include assessing a changing environment to create a vision of the future; determining how the organization fits into the anticipated environment, based on its mission, strengths, and weaknesses; then setting into motion a plan of action to position the organization to achieve its vision. We also support detailed action planning for specific priorities and goals, and to set up accountability plans.

We work with teams to increase productivity, build skills, and improve communication.

Is your team high functioning? Do team members communicate effectively? Do you know what energizes your colleagues? Emergenetics is an assessment that identifies how people think and behave, which leads to improved ability to communicate, accommodate different behavioral and thinking preferences, and implement change. NACCHO consultants provide the Emergenetics training to foster greater understanding of and appreciation for different thinking and behavioral attributes within a team.

Are your meetings useful and productive? Do your meeting attendees know what is expected of them at the end of the meeting? NACCHO consultants offer training in and facilitation of meetings and group activities. NACCHO consultants have expertise in developing a plan for meetings or trainings. We are trained in facilitation and process design and have a wealth of experience with meeting design and facilitation and can help create an effective agenda based on the goals and objectives for the meeting. We provide training in the key facilitation principles, including practical examples and practice.

Are you exploring the root causes of inequities in the distribution of disease and illness? Are you investigating social injustice and everyday public health practice? NACCHO provides training on infusing a health equity lens into an agency’s programmatic work. NACCHO can support action planning and facilitation processes for communities to identify priorities to operationalize this concept.

We work with teams to monitor, respond to, and prepare for specific public health topics.

Are you prepared for a radiological spill? Have your community partners created a plan to respond to a public health emergency? NACCHO’s consultants are trained, experienced, and can assist your organization with designing, executing, facilitating, and evaluating Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program-compliant tabletop, functional, and full-scale exercises. The NACCHO Exercise Team has expertise with a variety of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive topics and can align your exercises with public health and hospital preparedness drill requirements and individual planning and programmatic needs.

Do you know how your community’s built environment affects health? How is physical activity affected by your community’s design? NACCHO consultants can provide expertise on healthy community design. Through survey development, data gathering, and technical assistance, NACCHO consultants can support local jurisdictions in their built environment activities.

Do you need data on Zika in local communities? Do you know how local jurisdictions are responding to Zika? NACCHO consultants have expertise in evaluating the capacity and effectiveness of Zika programs and resources.

If you'd like more information on NACCHO Consulting, please send us an email at [email protected].

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