ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
DIRECT FROM CDC ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
Connecting Environmental Public Health With the Revised 10 Essential Public Health Services
Ana Pomales, MSc
Adrienne Gill, MPH
Justin Andrew Gerding, MPH, DHA, REHS
Understanding the Revised 10 Essential Services By 2020, the public health landscape had changed with an accompanying evolution of performance improvement initiatives. This evolution culminated in a collaborative and comprehensive revision of the 10 Essential Services (Figure 1). These revisions were led by a task force of public health experts and guided by significant input from the field (PHNCI, 2020). Field input guided the task force to “keep but revise” the original frame- work and provided input on a variety of revi- sions needed. Key changes in the revised 10 Essential Services released in 2020 include: •Centering the framework around equity and including a statement underscoring the role of the 10 Essential Services in achieving equity. •Incorporating social determinants of health and equity throughout each Essen- tial Service. • Updating language to better reflect current public health practice, including changes in technology, data use, and communications. •Refocusing Essential Service #9 around evaluation, research, and continuous qual- ity improvement. • Adding organizational infrastructure to the framework through revisions to Essential Service #10. Like the original, the revised 10 Essential Services framework is already playing impor- tant roles with key public health initiatives, such as defining the scope of public health practice for revised Core Competencies for Public Health Professionals and providing an updated framing for PHAB Version 2022 of the health department accreditation standards.
Editor’s Note: The National Environmental Health Association strives to provide up-to-date and relevant information on environmental health and to build partnerships in the profession. In pursuit of these goals, we feature this column on environmental health services from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in every issue of the Journal . In these columns, authors from CDC’s Water, Food, and Environmental Health Services Branch, as well as guest authors, will share tools, resources, and guidance for environmental health practitioners. The conclusions in these columns are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the ocial position of CDC. Ana Pomales is an environmental health scientist at the National Center for Environmental Health (NCEH) within CDC. Adrienne Gill is a public health advisor with the Center for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support within CDC. Justin Gerding leads the Environmental Health Practice Section within the NCEH Water, Food, and Environmental Health Services Branch.
T he 10 Essential Public Health Ser- vices (10 Essential Services) provide a common understanding of what public health activities should occur in all communities. Since their release in the mid- 1990s, the 10 Essential Services have helped drive public health practice in many ways, such as framing health department accredita- tion standards, being incorporated into state public health laws, and serving as the basis for discipline-specific modifications such as the 10 Essential Environmental Public Health Services (10 Essential EPH Services; Pub- lic Health National Center for Innovations [PHNCI], 2019). While the 10 Essential EPH Services are closely aligned with the 10 Essential Services,
a specific and direct application to environ- mental public health practice was interwo- ven into the framework. Since their release in 2007, the 10 Essential EPH Services have served as the foundation for promoting the role of environmental health in broader public health performance improvement initiatives. Specifically, the 10 Essential EPH Services led to creating the Environmental Public Health Performance Standards (EnvPHPS) and in- formed the work of environmental public health think tanks with the Public Health Ac- creditation Board (PHAB). These think tanks focused on describing and understanding the role and contributions of environmental pub- lic health to the PHAB accreditation process and standards (Gerding et al., 2020).
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