School’s NC Institute for Public Health awarded grant to examine public health agency accreditation

Accreditation of local health departments is a cutting-edge initiative designed to improve performance, quality, consistency and accountability in the delivery of essential public health services. North Carolina leads the nation, with 50 of its 85 local health departments having been accredited as of this year. NCIPH administers the state’s accreditation program.

Gene Matthews, JD

“During this serious economic recession, health department accreditation initiatives provide vital tools to measure standards of performance,” said Gene Matthews, JD, senior fellow at NCIPH and director of the project. “Knowing how well health agencies are delivering essential public health services to their communities is even more important during hard economic times.”

The Institute was one of 15 recipients, selected from a field of 235 applicants, of grants from the Foundation’s newly established Public Health Law Research program, which aims to build evidence for and strengthen use of effective regulatory, legal and policy tools to improve public health. To advance the understanding and use of public health law, the Foundation program supports legal analysis and research to learn about the health impacts of specific laws within different communities and settings.

Effective Dec. 1, the grant enables NCIPH to assess accreditation laws, policies and regulations in 20 states that have made progress toward accrediting state or local health departments. The Institute also will conduct case studies of six of those states to determine how and why they chose a particular legal structure for accreditation. The case studies will use public health system and services research (PHSSR) to explore the impact of legal structures on accreditation capacity, functions and outputs.

“It is quite an honor to be one of the first handful of organizations selected by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore this new field of public health law research,” Matthews said. “We are indebted to the leadership of North Carolina in being the first state to enact a specific law in 2005 to implement a public health department accreditation program that is now setting an example for other states.”

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans. The Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change.

For more information, contact Gene Matthews, (919) 966-9924 or matthewsphlaw@aol.com.

UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.