ES 7 – Assure

Essential Public Health Service 7: Assure an effective system that enables equitable access to the individual services and care needed to be healthy

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Learn how environmental health programs support Essential Public Health Service 7 and public health accreditation.

These activities support Essential Service 7 (assurance and access to services).
Public health wheel showing essential service 7 in dark color, with equity at the center.
Essential Public Health Service 7

Essential service 7—assure an effective system that enables equitable access to the individual services and care needed to be healthy—is one of the essential services aligned to the Assurance core function.

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Here are some examples of common activities* that help deliver essential service 7.

Ensuring all community members have equal access to health care and social services needed as a result of environmental exposures by identifying and addressing barriers to services.

Identifying and addressing factors (for example, language barriers, access to information technology) limiting access or creating barriers to environmental health services.

Convening the multiple agencies with responsibility in areas of environmental health (for example, identification and remediation of chemical exposures) to ensure a coordinated, timely program delivery system that is responsive to all community members.

These activities connect to PHAB standards.

Environmental health programs also link to and support broader public health initiatives such as public health accreditation. Following are examples of activities that could contribute to accreditation by the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB). Completing these activities does not guarantee conformity to PHAB documentation requirements.

PHAB Standard 7.1: Engage with partners in the health care system to assess and improve health service availability.

  • Collaborating with the healthcare system to identify populations experiencing barriers to environmental public health services (for example, clinical services for assessment and treatment of environmental exposures such as blood lead screening).

PHAB Standard 7.2: Connect the population to services that support the whole person.

  • Developing referral mechanisms among the community’s environmental public health and protection programs to link community members to needed services and ensure all community members have equal access to all services (for example, develop protocols for referrals for children’s blood lead screening services, home lead inspections, and lead remediation services).

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*Examples are not exhaustive.