INTEGRATING PUBLIC HEALTH IN LAND REUSE AND REDEVELOPMENT - Part 2: Assessing Local Health Agency Capacity to Integrate Environmental Health and Land Reuse Work
Citation:
Berman, L., S. Deflorio-Barker, AND S. Whitehead. INTEGRATING PUBLIC HEALTH IN LAND REUSE AND REDEVELOPMENT - Part 2: Assessing Local Health Agency Capacity to Integrate Environmental Health and Land Reuse Work. JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH. National Environmental Health Association, Denver, CO, 81(9):36-39, (2019).
Impact/Purpose:
This analysis focused on understanding the capacity of local health departments to respond to environmental health issues within their service area. Five educational modules were created (Toxicology, Epidemiology, Risk Assessment, Risk communication, and Brownfields) to help improve capacity in local health departments. No Doi URL: PMID: 31798188 PMCID: PMC6889881
Description:
Many local health departments (LHDs) across the country coordinate with their service areas on environmental health or land reuse. The Brownfields & Reuse Opportunity Working Group (BROWN) is a multipartner land reuse stakeholder network that includes member representatives from state and local health agencies, federal agencies, environmental consultants, environmental health professionals, and academia. In 2015, BROWN provided input on five Environmental Health Resources Self Learning Modules (Epidemiology, Risk Assessment, Risk Communications, Land Reuse Sites, and Toxicology) that the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) was developing. ATSDR created the educational modules as resources and self-study guides to increase LHD capacity to respond to environmental issues. Following input from BROWN members on the modules, the National Environmental Health Association independently developed a short survey to identify baseline capacity of environmental professionals, primarily LHD professionals, to address environmental health and land reuse issues. The survey results of 93 LHD personnel indicated variation in the level of education among LHD employees and how often specific environmental health and land reuse services were requested. A subset of three LHD respondents also provided input into the learning modules.
