ABSTRACT
The national public health department accreditation program was launched in September 2011 intentionally based on concepts associated with improving and protecting the health of the public by advancing and ultimately transforming the quality and performance of state, local, tribal, and territorial public health departments. Elements of the accreditation program were created by practitioners for practitioners in an attempt to address the fragmentation in governmental public health department services that was described in a 2003 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, The Future of the Public’s Health in the 21st Century. 1 Accreditation standards and measures, designed to capture the capacity of a health department to provide their public health services in alignment with the ten Essential Public Health Services, were developed. A balance between the description of the organizational capacity of the health department to operate and their need to be fl exible as they address the specifi c health status indicators for their jurisdictions was paramount as the program was developed. In short, the national public health department accreditation program assumes that a health department that understands the health status of its jurisdiction and implements, either alone
or in partnership, those best and promising practices specifi cally designed to improve health status, will in fact contribute positively to health status improvement. However, measurement of the health department’s contribution to health status improvement continues to be a challenge given the complexities associated with the multiple determinants of health.
