What I've Learned About Public Health | Austin Burke

I don’t have a background in public health. I only had a basic understanding of it when I accepted my VISTA position on the Public Health Initiatives team at Wichita State’s Center for Community Support and Research (CCSR). I get to serve, protect and improve the public’s health? Sure that sounds fun, sign me up! My mom thinks public health is “like that Ebola stuff”. That’s not wrong, but it’s not all public health does. Through my work in Public Health Accreditation, I learned an amazing amount about public health and the people who do this work every day. 

Public Health Accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) is a measurement of health department performance against a set of nationally recognized, practice-

focused and evidenced-based standards. Accreditation is based off of the three core functions (assurance, assessment and policy development) and 10 essential services of public health (pictured). In order to gain accreditation, a health department must perform and be able to document these services in addition to passing a site review. The goal of accreditation is to improve and protect the health of the public by advancing the quality and performance of tribal, state, local, and territorial public health departments.

The Kansas Accreditation Readiness Project (KARP) is a learning group designed to build health departments capacity to prepare for this accreditation. Every month CCSR facilitates a webinar where the learning group reviews accreditation standards information, peer reviews documents needed for accreditation, and gain insight from PHAB site reviewers.

This project has opened my eyes to all aspects of public health. The first thing I learned was about the comprehensiveness of public health. The standards and measures document for accreditation is 264 pages long, and it doesn’t go into details! There are hundreds of required documents to demonstrate that a health department meets the measures.

I also learned about some of the barriers health departments face on a day-to-day basis. I was surprised to learn that for many counties in Kansas, the number of health department staff can be counted on one hand. Many of these employees have other duties in addition to the public health work they do. It also made me feel great to see that these people are making an effort to get accredited in order to better serve their community. It can seem like a daunting task for a small department, but they are making an effort to better serve their population.

Lastly, I was able to learn that public health is a small world. I met some of the KARP participants at the Kansas Public Health Association conference in Topeka and ran into other public health professionals that I thought I’d never meet. I’m excited to continue work on this project and meet more great public health workers.