Evaluation of the Comprehensive Public Health System Assessment

The Public Health National Center for Innovations (PHNCI) at the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) seeks to help align public health system partners and promote innovation in public health practice. A key part of PHNCI efforts will focus on helping create and support coalitions of health system members in targeted states and localities, and assist them in implementing innovative approaches to providing foundational public health services in these areas. Ideally, PHNCI efforts in these communities will result in the development of more comprehensive public health systems. The National Longitudinal Survey of Public Health Systems (NLSPHS) Comprehensive Public Health System Assessment (CPHSA) provides one of the only tools to measure public health system comprehensiveness, including the implementation of the foundational public health services (FPHS) defined by the Public Health Leadership Forum. To support and assess PHNCI efforts relative to building stronger public health systems and the implementation and delivery of foundational public health services, personnel at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health (UKCPH) will use a combination of quantitative methods centered on the CPHSA to assess the extent to which comprehensive systems are being developed in targeted communities (relative to their peers in other communities), including progress in PHNCI communities of the implementation of foundational public health services; and quantitative methods to determine the facilitators and barriers to comprehensive system development, as well as preliminary impacts of PHNCI efforts, focused on public health system development and the impact of PHNCI efforts (what grantees implement, how and how well etc.).