Karen Frederickson Comer, Director of Collaborative Research and Health Geoinformatics for The Polis Center, co-authored a peer-reviewed article about local health department accreditation in Indiana.
“It’s Not Just a Yes or No Answer: Expressions of Local Health Department Accreditation” was published in the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Public Health(www.frontiersin.org), Vol. 4, Article 21. Specifically, she assisted with the development of the survey instrument and edited the manuscript.
The article analyzes the results of an observational study which concentrated on the decisions of local (Indiana) health departments to pursue accreditation and the influences on that pursuit and determination. The study is the first of its kind to consider the association between attitudes about accreditation and the pursuit and progress thereof.
Nationally, health department pursuit of accreditation is voluntary. There are no regulations or laws in Indiana regarding accreditation for local health departments; although, the Indiana Public Health Association (IPHA) organizes the statewide Indiana Accreditation Partnership, which is focused on advancing accreditation. Indiana’s neighbor, Ohio, requires local health districts to achieve accreditation, so it is useful to understand the decisions by leadership on the necessity of accreditation.
According to the authors, “While accreditation in public health…is seen as a quality-initiative, public health accreditation is not necessarily a uniformly shared goal across the country. Our intent here (with the study) is not to suggest that accreditation should be sought by all health departments. It is, instead, to understand accreditation adoption as a structural effort to advance public health performance improvement….Understanding accreditation pursuit and progress differentiation will allow a more meaningful understanding of indicators and their influence of this performance improvement initiative over time.”
The other authors include Beth E. Meyerson, Dept. of Applied Health Science, IU School of Public Health; Jerry King, Indiana Public Health Association; Sandra S. Liu, College of Health and Human Sciences, Purdue University; and Laura Miller, Dept. of Applied Health Science, IU School of Public Health. Read the article here.
Frontiers in Public Health is a peer-reviewed journal aimed at the scientific community interested in the broad area of public health. It covers all aspects of public health and human development in the form of review articles, original articles, case reports, short communications, letters to the editor, and book reviews. The International Editorial Board is dedicated to producing a high quality scientific journal of interest to researchers and practitioners from many disciplines.