Local health departments use NC ENVIROSCAN to incorporate environmental health data into community health needs assessments

A new collaboration between UNC SRP and North Carolina county health departments will help counties more easily incorporate environmental health and environmental justice perspectives into their community health needs assessments.

Alyssa Cabacungan, a former public health advisor working at Cabarrus Health Alliance and Rowan County Public Health is passionate about building environmental health concerns into larger health needs assessments in North Carolina, noting that “environmental health departments are often siloed from the rest of local health departments.” These needs assessments are used by public health departments to get a comprehensive picture of the health of their communities and are used to make plans for programming to address health issues.

In her public health advisor role, she developed the Environmental Health and Quality Toolkit designed to help local health departments incorporate environmental health data into their needs assessments. As part of this toolkit she wanted to include data about patterns of drinking water contamination in private wells into health needs assessments.

Following a presentation on NC ENVIROSCAN given by UNC SRP’s Dr. Lauren Eaves and Dr. Andrew George at the North Carolina Conservation Network (NCCN) conference in May, NCCN leaders connected  Eaves with Cabacungan.

Normally, counties receive well test data as individual reports for each resident from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS). However consolidated data, such as that available through NC ENVIROSCAN, is essential for counties to be able to move community health campaigns and programming forward.  Cabacungan noted that even when NC DHHS provided her with data in this format, she did not have the skills to process it.

NC ENVIROSCAN map of average manganese levels in census tracts of Cabarrus County, NC. The lightest colors have levels below 35 parts per billion (ppb) and the darkest greens have levels equal to or above 100 ppb.

“Likewise, some health departments don’t have the resources to go through all that well test data,” says Cabacungan. “They may not have the time or an epidemiologist on staff. NC ENVIROSCAN can provide them additional support.” Through a collaboration with Eaves, Cabacungan was able to incorporate NC ENVIROSCAN maps and results into the toolkit.

The surveillance data available in the NC ENVIROSCAN tool can be used by local health departments for needs assessment and compliance reporting. Dr. Eaves points to the advantages of using NC ENVIROSCAN for this purpose, including that it can be used to organize and visualize data that is otherwise challenging to access.  She notes that other tools, such as EPA’s EJ Atlas do not provide well test data. NC ENVIROSCAN can be used to map other public health variables alongside environmental data.

 

Now that Cabacungan has used NC ENVIROSCAN in reporting for Rowan and Cabarrus counties, she hopes that the development of the new toolkit will allow counties across the state to easily pull data from NC ENVIROSCAN and other sources to incorporate environmental health into their reporting.

SRP Trainee, Cailee Harrington

As part of this collaboration, UNC SRP trainee Cailee Harrington helped Eaves and Cabacungan develop a video training guide to help other counties easily incorporate NC ENVIROSCAN into their needs assessments. Dr. Eaves hopes that these training materials will be useful to future NC ENVIROSCAN users to easily develop their own maps.

“This has been a very exciting project to work on,” said Cabacungan, brimming with enthusiasm. “This will support environmental health and environmental justice in local health departments and the counties they serve.” The full toolkit will be released this fall. Harrington will be presenting a poster on the project, entitled NC ENVIROSCAN, a web-based GIS tool to investigate chemical and non-chemical hazards in North Carolina: Applications for environmental justice at the International Society of Exposure Science Annual Meeting.

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Director: Rebecca Fry, PhD
Deputy Director: Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena, PhD
Funding provided by NIEHS grant #P42 ES031007

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