Public health professionals are regularly asked to recommend training programs for their constituents. For this assignment, you will assess a CDC environmental health training program of your choice.
Instructions
Identify a training program that addresses Healthy People 2030: Objectives and DataLinks to an external site. associated with environmental health from the CDC's Environmental Health Services EHS Training.Links to an external site.
Write an evaluation of the program in which you complete the following:
Describe the approach the EHS training program uses to address Healthy People environmental health goals.
Evaluate the effectiveness of the program in meeting the requirements of the related environmental health policy.
Determine whether the program's design addresses the needs of the intended audience.
Create a list of questions to evaluate an environmental health training program.
Provide an academic rationale to support the evaluation criteria used.
Sample Answer
Evaluation of CDC's Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Training
The CDC's EPHT Network provides various training modules (e.g., Introduction to EPHT, Data Analysis and Visualization) aimed at state and local public health professionals to use environmental and health data effectively.
1. Approach to Addressing Healthy People 2030 Environmental Health Goals
The EPHT training program directly addresses several HP2030 environmental health objectives, particularly those focused on data accessibility, monitoring, and reducing harmful exposures.
Data Links: The core approach is to equip public health professionals with the skills to link environmental hazard data (e.g., air quality, water quality) with health outcome data (e.g., asthma, cancer). This aligns with HP2030 goals like EH-01: Reduce the number of days people are exposed to unhealthy air and EH-03: Reduce per capita water consumption.
Surveillance Capacity: The training emphasizes the use of the EPHT Network's tools and data visualizations, thereby strengthening the surveillance capacity of state and local health departments. This allows jurisdictions to monitor progress toward HP2030 benchmarks and identify areas where environmental policies are failing to protect populations.