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DIRECT FROM CDC ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
Equipping Educators to Empower Students With a Tracking Education Kit
Chad Curtiss
The Tracking Program provides publicly accessible resources educators can use to sup- port common environmental health activities such as: • Monitoring community health. • Identifying people who live or work in set- tings that put them at greater risk from exposure to hazards. • Conducting epidemiological studies. • Planning and applying prevention activities. • Sharing information with communities. • Informing city or state planning and health policies. Tracking Program Resources for Educators The Tracking Program recognizes that it is not enough to just have data. It is equally important to deliver these data in a variety of ways to serve the dierent needs of users and inform research and decision making at local, state, and national levels. The Tracking Program provides power- ful public health data and visualization tools that can help educators and their students better characterize public health issues of interest. The tools enable stu- dents to explore data connections between people who live in locations that put them at greater risk of being exposed to haz- ards, environmental factors, and diseases. The tools also provide links to information about the selected data and to all Tracking Program content areas, indicators, data, and associated information. Educators will benefit from the Tracking Program data visualization resources that can be used to develop lesson plans. Students can use Tracking Program data to better include data-informed connections in their work.
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. Chad Curtiss is an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) fellow with the CDC National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program. He works to accelerate public health workforce development within the Tracking Program for educators and public health practitioners.
A survey from 2019 found that one in four environmental health profession- als are older than 55 years and fur- thermore, one in four environmental health professionals planned to retire within 5 years (Gerding et al., 2019). Those findings reveal serious recruitment needs within the envi- ronmental health workforce. In addition, the public health landscape continues to evolve, with technological improvements in data col- lection, analysis, visualization, and dissemina- tion. New environmental public health profes- sionals must be equipped with the most cur- rent and best resources to help them succeed in their jobs. Educating new environmental health professionals starts at the undergradu- ate level. It continues through graduate stud- ies and beyond, and the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program (Tracking Program) within the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention is ready with timely and practical resources for this growing area of need.
Public Health Educator Goals and Responsibilities to Prepare Students
Public health educators in universities and colleges are crucial in providing essential public health knowledge to students. As they prepare students for the workforce, they are responsible for covering a wide range of top- ics and tools as part of their course delivery. Their instruction is instrumental in guid- ing student understanding of environmental health topics such as environmental justice, climate and health, air and water quality, and environmental hazards. Addressing the breadth of topics requires time to plan and awareness of relevant resources—challenges that many educators face.
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