The foundation of clinical performance protocols should aim for clinical excellence by focusing on clinical care guidelines, training, continuous improvement plans, and clinical benchmarks and dashboards that are supported by best practices and evidence-based practices.
Answer:
WHAT IS PUBLIC HEALTH?
WHO IS THE TYPICAL PUBLIC HEALTH PROFESSIONAL?
WHAT ARE THE TEN ESSENTIAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES?
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO IMPLEMENT AND MONITOR THE TEN ESSENTIAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES?
HOW ARE THE TEN ESSENTIAL SERVICES USED IN COMMUNITY PRACTICE?
WHAT IS PUBLIC HEALTH?
As you probably concluded from the quiz scenarios, public health is everywhere – it is a part of the infrastructure that keeps our communities safe and healthy.
Depending on which resource you read, you will find varying definitions of the mission of public health. However, the most current and widely accepted mission definition is:
“Promote physical and mental health, and prevent disease, injury, and disability.”
Public health services may go unnoticed within a community because they are often (but not always) preventive versus reactive. For example, which community service are you more likely to notice - an environmental health specialist inspecting the safety of a local university’s food service establishments, or a fire truck speeding down the street with its lights and sirens on?
Despite having a relatively ‘low profile’ status, public health services play a key role in assuring the health and well being of communities. Throughout the 1900s, the average lifespan of persons in the United States increased by more than 30 years. According to an article by Bunker, Frazier, and Mosteller (1994), 25 years of this are attributable to advances in public health.
WHO IS THE TYPICAL PUBLIC HEALTH PROFESSIONAL?
There really is no “typical” public health professional. The public health workforce in the United States consists of approximately 500,000 individuals with diverse professional training and experience.
How do all of these people with a unified purpose but different skills work together successfully to carry out the mission of public health? They have a logic model to consult: the Ten Essential Services of Public Health.
The Ten Essential Services of Public Health differ in some ways from other logic models presented in Chapter 2 of the Tool Box. Other logic models discussed incorporate prescribed processes (e.g., from planning to implementation to evaluation) diagrammed in a flow chart that can then be applied to one priority goal like teen pregnancy prevention. In contrast, there is no prescribed order of implementation for the Ten Essential Services—no flow chart, and no one specific outcome that results from implementing all ten Essential Services. Rather, the Ten Essential Services have the potential to create a comprehensive infrastructure that can provide a supportive context for any public health priority in a community.
Although the more prescriptive logic models may be narrow in scope once applied to one goal, they can also undertake a comprehensive approach within a community. For example, a planning phase might involve stakeholders from non-public health sectors of the community, in an effort to foster the most supportive context for change. This is not unlike the impact of the Ten Essential Services.
You may be wondering,
“Why do people need a logic model for direction if they are already working towards the same mission?”
Because of their diverse backgrounds, some professionals have been trained to follow different paradigms (models) in their specialties. One example is the “medical model” versus the “public health model.” The most significant difference between the two models is that public health activities focus on entire populations, while clinical activities focus on individual patients. Table 2 below summarizes key differences between the paradigms that are typically used to train clinical and public health professionals.
Table 2: Public Health versus Medical Models of Professional Training
Public Health Model |
Medical Model |
Primary focus on population |
Primary focus on the individual |
Public service ethic, tempered by concerns for the individual |
Personal service ethic, conditioned by awareness of social responsibilities |
Emphasis on prevention and health promotion for the whole community |
Emphasis on diagnosis, treatment, and care for the whole patient |
Paradigm employs a spectrum of interventions aimed at the environment, human behavior and lifestyle, and medical care |
Paradigm places predominant emphasis on medical care |
The Ten Essential Public Health Servicesprovide a common ground for professionals trained in either paradigm, as well as grassroots workers and non-public health civic leaders, so they can work collaboratively towards fulfilling the public health mission:
“To promote physical and mental health, and prevent disease, injury, and disability.”
Now that you have a better understanding of public health, let’s talk about the origin, purpose, and function of the Ten Essential Public Health Services.
WHAT ARE THE TEN ESSENTIAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES?
From 1988 to the early 1990s, the recognized “core functions” of public health were:
In 1993, with a new presidential administration and federal and state attempts to reform the health care system in the United States, public health leaders decided to set forth a more detailed and utilitarian consensus statement that would “speak with one voice” to public health professionals, the general population, and the policymakers who would shape health care reform.
Public health leaders worked to define a more detailed logic model of core public health functions. The end result was a consensus statement that included the Ten Essential Public Health Services, adopted in 1994.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO IMPLEMENT AND MONITOR THE TEN ESSENTIAL PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICES?
The theme of prevention is the most powerful element in the implementation of the Ten Essential Public Health Services.
It is important to not only implement but also monitor—or track, assess, and modify, as needed—the Ten Essential Public Health Services. With data or other information about the Services’ costs or expenditures, implementation, and impact, monitoring can contribute to informed policy decisions about public health program development and funding at local, state, and national levels.
HOW ARE THE TEN ESSENTIAL SERVICES USED IN COMMUNITY PRACTICE?
On the pages that follow, each Essential Service is discussed in order from 1 to 10. Each discussion includes a definition of the Service and some examples of national or community practice. Keep in mind that the Services do not necessarily need to be implemented in the “1 – 10” sequence, or even independently.
The Ten Essential Services are independent yet complementary goals for communities to work toward. You should actually strive to implement the services simultaneously in your community as a means of carrying out the mission of public health. However, you may find that you identify with only one or two in terms of your role in your community’s public health initiatives as you read through this section.
Essential Service #1: Monitor health status to identify community health problems.
Public health surveillance—the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health related data—is at the core of this Essential Service.
Essential Service #1 encompasses public health activities such as:
National level, population-based surveillance systems administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) include:
You can access CDC data electronically at the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionwebsite. You may not immediately think to use national level data when working at the community level. However, national level surveillance data can provide trend data to use as a benchmark as you assess health status measures (e.g., the number of children immunized prior to entering preschool) in your community. Prior to investing resources and time in a program, it is often necessary to conduct a needs assessment. Community data collected via a needs assessment can be compared to existing data at the national level. If you discover that your community actually has an excellent rate for a health status measure as compared to 75% of the states in the country, you may shift your prevention program priorities to a different measure or target population!
If you do not have the time or resources to conduct your own needs assessment, you can search for community level data in resources including:
Essential Service #2: Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community.
Essential Service #2 encompasses public health activities such as:
At the national level, the United States Department of Health and Human Services oversees the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The Agency’s overall function is to “serve the public by using the best science, taking responsive public health actions, and providing trusted health information to prevent harmful exposures and disease related to toxic substances.”
Via grants and cooperative agreements, ATSDR provides funding and technical assistance for states to identify and evaluate environmental health threats to communities, as well as educate the communities about health risk or other findings.
At the local level, public health laboratories provide diagnostic testing, disease surveillance, applied research, laboratory training and other essential services to the communities they serve. Laboratory work is diverse, yet accomplished by highly trained and skilled professionals.
Public health laboratory professionals and epidemiologists are the ones working behind the scenes on the issues that you hear about in the news. These include: newborn screening; Lyme disease; West Nile virus; food borne illness outbreak investigations; and bio-terrorism threats. The Association of Public Health Laboratories was founded by state and territorial public health laboratory directors serving communities across the United States. You may want to visit this website to learn more about the public health laboratory expertise and services available in your own community.
Essential Service #3: Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues.
You have probably come across—and even participated in— health promotion and social marketing efforts in your community.
Essential Service #3 encompasses public health activities such as:
You may have noticed national media campaign advertisements on television, billboards, or even posters or fliers in your doctor’s office. Some examples include the “Back to Sleep” campaign to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or the anti-substance abuse campaign, “Just Say No.”
Many national awareness weeks also relate directly to public health efforts. The American Public Health Association, headquartered in Washington, D.C., actually sponsors a “National Public Health Week” each spring. You can find additional information, and links to free tools and resources for National Public Health Week. You may decide to sponsor an event such as a fun run or health fair to raise public health awareness in your own community!
Essential Service #4: Mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems.
These activities represent a comprehensive approach to community health, in which professionals and even entire sectors of a community collaborate to plan, implement, monitor, evaluate, and subsequently modify activities, and repeat the process as needed.
Essential Service #4 encompasses public health activities such as:
This is not unlike the PATCH logic model – the Planned Approach to Community Health
Included in the PATCH strategy are five elements that are fundamental to the success of any community health promotion process:
You can read about a similar process for mobilizing community partnerships to identify and solve health problems in the Community Tool Box's Community Action Guide: A Framework for Addressing Community Goals and Problems.
The overall goal of action planning is to increase your community’s ability to work together to affect conditions and outcomes that matter to its residents—and to do so both over time and across issues of interest.
As your community works towards a broad vision of health for all, creating supportive conditions for change requires comprehensive efforts among diverse sectors of the community. These include health organizations, faith communities, schools, and businesses. Representatives of each sector come together to form a community coalition. Your community coalition can strive to influence systems changes—programs, policies, and practices that can enhance or detract from the community’s capacity to be a supportive environment for healthy living.
Essential Service #5: Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts.
Because state and local public health programs are often funded at least in part with Federal dollars, accountability is often a key issue. Public health programs therefore document progress towards positive change in health behavior or health status indicators. For example, the Federal Maternal and Child Health Services Block Grant, which imposes a $3 state match for every $4, requires annual reporting of “performance measures.” Some of those are state-negotiated to allow for flexibility in tracking health behavior or health status indicators that are unique to a state’s populations. Data such as these can be presented to policymakers to document the value or effectiveness of a program. Those data can also be used for continued program planning and modification.
Essential Service #5 encompasses public health activities such as:
Essential Service #6: Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.
While you may not always be conscious of how public health regulations have influenced your community environment, think about some of the things that you see or experience when you visit restaurants. You may have noticed a framed certificate hanging on the wall, with “Sanitation Grade A.” This certificate is a result of local health department inspections to assure that the restaurant is in compliance with food storage, handling, and preparation regulations.
While at that same restaurant, you may also notice a sign that says, “No smoking.” This may be a direct result of a statewide law that was designed to improve the environmental health conditions in your community.
If you have school-aged children and have had to prepare them for entrance into the public school system, you know that the full series of immunizations is required. Immunizations are required for school-aged children in the United States because when widespread immunizations are in place, we all benefit from what is referred to as “herd immunity.” When a group of people (e.g., an entire community, state, or nation) is immunized against an infectious disease, it makes it more difficult for the disease to spread and cause an epidemic.
Essential Service #6 encompasses public health activities such as:
Essential Service #6 may be implemented in your community as a result of either state or federal legislation. Not only can you take on a leadership role in your community to assure that public health regulations are enforced; you can be a catalyst for change by identifying and prioritizing new issues, and sponsoring new regulations through public health advocacy.
Essential Service #7: Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable.
Essential Service #7 encompasses public health activities such as:
The implementation of this Essential Service is inherently linked to the social, economic, and political climate in communities, states, and the nation. To assure the provision of health care when it is otherwise unavailable, the United States federal government funds two “safety net” programs: Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people and families with low incomes and resources. This program became law in 1965, and is jointly funded by the federal and state governments (including the District of Columbia and the Territories) to assist states in providing medical long-term care assistance to people who meet certain eligibility criteria.
The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 created a new children's health insurance program called the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). SCHIP is a state administered program, and each state sets its own guidelines regarding eligibility and services for children up to age 19 who are uninsured. Families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid may still be able to qualify for SCHIP.
To learn more about the Medicaid and SCHIP programs and how they can benefit members of your community, please visit: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The availability of programs like Medicaid and SCHIP is not sufficient. Public health professionals also have to provide outreach services to the populations in need of these programs. Outreach might include:
Culturally and linguistically appropriate materials are a critical component of outreach efforts in a country in which many immigrant languages are spoken. Public health professionals can use decennial census data or community level needs assessments to determine how many and which languages are spoken in a geographic region. To provide outreach and other services in a culturally competent manner, public health professionals can apply guidelines developed by the National Center for Cultural Competence. The Center produces publications that teach people how to adapt health promotion materials already developed and written in English.
Essential Service #8: Assure a competent public health and personal health care workforce.
Essential Service #8 encompasses public health activities such as:
There are many opportunities for certified education, training, and continuing education in public health. The Association of Schools of Public Health is a membership organization of the 27 accredited schools of public health that prepare people for a public health profession. The accrediting body, an independent agency recognized by the United States Department of Education, is the Council on Education for Public Health.
Continuing education opportunities abound at professional conferences and in professional journals. Furthermore, the advent of the Internet has brought new access to continuing education through the availability of online certificate and other training programs. These distance-based programs—particularly the ones offered through accredited schools of public health—offer an invaluable alternative to the sometimes-prohibitive costs and time commitment of travel for state and local public health professionals.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsors many training and continuing education opportunities on site and in the accredited schools of public health across the country. One example is Academic Centers for Public Health Preparedness (A-CPHP). These centers work together to improve the capacity of the front line public health and health care workers to quickly respond to bioterrorism, infectious disease outbreaks, and other public health threats and emergencies.The network of Centers represents a unique partnership between the schools of public health, the Association of Schools of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and representatives from state and local public health agencies, and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).
Other programs meet the education and training needs of rising public health professionals while simultaneously enhancing workforce capacity in the field. One example is the Federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s Graduate Student Internship Program, which places Maternal and Child Health graduate students in state health departments for summer internships via a competitive process for both health departments and students.
Essential Service #9: Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based health services.
Evaluation helps public health professionals continually refine or revise program approaches in future years of funding. Furthermore, evaluation data provide information about the relative costs and effort for tasks so activity and budget adjustments can be made.
Essential Service #9 encompasses public health activities such as:
The process of evaluation helps public health professionals and their collaborators assess the success of community health initiatives. Evaluation normally requires that data be collected and analyzed. Surveillance data from Essential Service #1 can be used for this purpose. For example, because surveillance efforts are often (but not always) annual, your community could access retrospective and current or “baseline” data before planning a public health initiative.This baseline data could then also be used to document the health behavior or health status outcome measure(s) of interest both before and after implementation of the initiative.
Essential Service #10: Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems.
In order to implement the 10th Essential Service, state and local health department staff might carry out health services research via many different efforts including:
how clinical benchmarks and dashboards are utilized for three specific clinical care guidelines
how evidence based practice influences clinical performance protocols of each team members.
Monitor health status to identify community health problems.
2. Diagnose and investigate health problems and health hazards in the community.
3. Inform, educate, and empower people about health issues.
4. Develop policies and plans that support individual and community health efforts.
5. Enforce laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.
6. Mobilize community partnerships to identify and solve health problems.
7. Link people to needed personal health services and assure the provision of health care when otherwise unavailable.
8. Assure a competent public health and personal health care work force.
9. Evaluate effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of personal and population-based health services.
10. Research for new insights and innovative solutions to health problems.
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