Ten Essential Ingredients for Environmental Health Practice

Public health staff that work with environmental health, including those from departments of ecology, environmental quality, and agriculture. This course would also be useful for those at university environmental health services, labor and industry, natural resources, and food safety departments.

Course Description

This course describes the characteristics of contemporary environmental public health practice, based on the "Ten Essential Services of Public Health." Participants will learn how to organize environmental health and related activities and programs to effectively identify and manage environmental and communicable problems and threats that affect the health of people in their communities. The most current and best practices of environmental health programs will be discussed and case studies will be utilized to illustrate the application into practice. A tabletop exercise relating to a hypothetical communicable disease or environmental health incident will be used to demonstrate the learning from the training.

Download the course flyer [58KB Adobe® PDF file]

Learning Objectives

• Recognize core competencies that demonstrate effective environmental practice.
• Describe major challenges environmental jurisdictions and actions to address challenges.
• Understand methods to identify environmental health problems.
• Identify methods to measure the amount of Essential Services integration into environmental health practice.
• Identify training needs for effective environmental health practice within an organization.

Teaching Format

This course uses many modes of delivery, including lecture with a strong emphasis on using case studies to promote group interaction.

Estimated Time to Complete

This course is designed as a two and one-half day residential training. However, the scope of the course can be modified to fit into a shorter time frame if desired.

Course Developer

Carl Osaki, RS, MSPH
Clinical Associate Professor
Department of Environmental Health
University of Washington

Course Developer and Instructor

Past Participant Comments

"Very practical information that can be used at the local level. Reinforces my thoughts on how important it is to work with environmental health and develop a strong board of health."

Previous Offerings

The most recent offering of this course was at the Montana Summer Institute for Public Health, June, 2003.

Scheduling and Additional Information

For more information, or to schedule this course at your organization in the Northwest region (AK, ID, OR, MT, WA, WY), please e-mail NWCPHP or call (206) 685-1130.