National Voluntary Accreditation for Public Health Departments

CDC’s Role in Accreditation

Funding Support

CDC’s Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support (OSTLTS) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation co-fund the Public Health Accreditation Board’s (PHAB’s) accreditation activities. CDC also provides in-kind staff time and technical expertise to develop and continuously improve accreditation by contributing to PHAB think tanks and committees and by engaging subject matter experts and programs across CDC.

CDC OSTLTS also supports other national partners—such as the American Public Health Association, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, National Association of County and City Health Officials, National Indian Health Board, National Network of Public Health Institutes, and Public Health Foundation—to prepare health departments for accreditation by providing technical assistance, quality and performance improvement tools and training, and communication about accreditation.

Incentives and Other Support

CDC is uniquely positioned to play a strong role in promoting accreditation through incentives, both financial and nonfinancial. Examples of support and other incentives from CDC include the following:

• The OSTLTS-supported Accreditation Support Initiative [PDF – 229KB], which provides small amounts of funding to awardees in the field through national partner organizations
• Opportunities to use cooperative agreement and grant funding, such as the Preventive Health and Health Services Block Grant, to support accreditation efforts
• CDC funding opportunity announcements [PDF – 257KB] (FOAs) that include standard accreditation-related language, which may 1) ask about accreditation status and 2) allow the use of funds to support accreditation efforts, so long as the use is consistent with the spirit and authority of the FOA
• CDC’s Public Health Associate Program (PHAP), which is a highly-competitive, two-year training program providing PHAP associates with hands-on experience in public health settings. Many associates assist their host health department sites with accreditation readiness activities and provide much-needed staff support to these efforts. In addition, the application for prospective PHAP host sites asks whether the health department is accredited through PHAB.

CDC’s Role in Building Strategic or Programmatic Linkages

Considerable work has been done to identify and build connections between PHAB accreditation standards and public health programs, key initiatives, and emerging topics of interest to the public health community. CDC frequently plays a vital role in these explorations by leading the efforts, providing subject matter expertise, or supporting PHAB in its work to explore these topics. In many cases, these efforts have informed updates to the national standards, produced documents that summarize the key linkages, or developed other kinds of resources.

CDC-developed resources highlighting these connections include the following:

• Community Guide–Public Health Accreditation Board Standards Crosswalk (1.5): Helps health departments identify evidence-based interventions from The Community Guide whose implementation could help document conformity with PHAB standards and measures
• Public Health Accreditation and Prevention Status Reports (PSR) Crosswalk: Serves as a resource for health departments working to meet national accreditation standards and for departments considering the path to accreditation. The PSRs can play a valuable role in
  • Providing and highlighting federal data for consideration in data-driven efforts
  • Pinpointing opportunities for action
  • Exploring and developing new policies
• Accreditation and Emergency Preparedness: Linkages and Opportunities for Leveraging the Connections: Summarizes the connections identified through a crosswalk between accreditation standards and public health preparedness capabilities
• Environmental health and accreditation: Two commentaries by authors from CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, OSTLTS, and PHAB summarize activities to explore and enhance the key linkages between accreditation and environmental health:
  • Public Health Department Accreditation and Environmental Public Health: A Logical Collaboration [PDF – 290KB]
  • Public Health Department Accreditation and Environmental Public Health: Sustaining the Collaboration [PDF – 219KB]