A Recommendation for Implementation of an Organizational Assessment Focused on Culture and Quality Improvement Strategies for Local Health Departments
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- January 10, 2020
- Creator
-
Macchi, Marti
- Affiliation: Gillings School of Global Public Health, Public Health Leadership Program
- Abstract
- The mission of public health is to promote physical and mental health and prevent disease, injury and disability (Turnock, 2009). This mission requires significant collaboration between local, state and federal level agency practitioners. The public health challenges in the 21st century will be most effectively addressed by practitioners that proactively prepare to meet them through strategies such as workforce development, community engagement, and evidence-based practice. Local Health Departments (LHD) are tasked to meet the health needs of the public at the local level and face many challenges in fulfilling the public health mission. These challenges include managing financial constraints, developing capacity, ensuring workforce training, and providing leadership. An organizational assessment of the culture of a LHD, coupled with the accreditation (including a community health assessment process) can enhance the LHDs ability to meet the needs of their community by focusing on improving critical community health outcomes and applying evidence-based strategies to achieve goals. This paper focuses on an organizational assessment of a Local Health Department (LHD) to identify gaps in performance and opportunities for the application of quality improvement approaches and evidence-based practices to improve the organizational culture in which public health practitioners carry out the public health mission. In addition to a literature review, experiences and lessons learned from an organizational assessment in a North Carolina LHD will be highlighted to propose recommendations for incorporating an organizational assessment focused on culture into an overall accreditation process utilizing evidence-based interventions and quality improvement strategies. A variety of supports and resources are available to a LHD to address areas of performance and improve quality. In this paper a literature review will describe these supports and a case study will describe application of current supports and resources with the addition of an organizational assessment addressing culture and its role in performance and health outcomes.
- Date of publication
- August 2011
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Paper type: Policy
- Track: Leadership
- Advisor
- Steffen, David
- Degree
- Master of Public Health
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Graduation year
- 2011
- Language
- Deposit record
- b6f6bdeb-f0b9-4907-a2ad-769b5d2e1080
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