Technical Assistance

PHF offers flexible and affordable consultation to help organizations improve health and build their public health infrastructure. To find out how PHF can assist your project, contact Jacalyn Carden.

	Benefit from PHF's expertise in the area of performance improvement by requesting a seminar or in-depth technical assistance.
	Read about several past projects through which PHF offered assistance to organizations nationwide.

Performance Improvement Assistance

To help your health department in its efforts to protect and improve the health of the people in your community, PHF offers a variety of quality improvement technical assistance, training, and coaching services.
Learn about sevices for: States, in Particular Multi-State Learning Collaborative Grantees Local Health Departments

Seminars to help professionals get results  

PHF now offers affordable half-day or full-day seminars to help public health managers, partners, executives, or front-line staff manage performance and get better results.   Some of our recent seminar engagements include pre-conference workshops or staff in-services for the following:

• Kansas Health Institute
• University of Pittsburgh, Center for Public Health Practice
• South Carolina Public Health Association
• National Network of Public Health Institutes

To request a seminar for your organization or conference, contact Jacalyn Carden. All PHF seminars and follow-up sessions are on a fee-for-service basis.

Technical assistance projects to help organizations solve public health problems

To get better results for the health of Americans, public health organizations must transform the way they manage performance and solve complex problems. For decades, other industries have employed quality improvement principles and techniques to solve problems, eliminate errors, save money, and get better results. PHF believes that many of these same techniques hold great promise for solving today's most urgent public health problems. The challenge lies in appropriately selecting, tailoring, and using the right tools that will work for public health. A quality improvement (QI) technique that works well to raise immunization rates in a single clinic may need modifications to improve rates for entire populations. Similarly, a service industry tool to get at the root cause of "late pizza deliveries" may not automatically translate to pinpoint the problem with "late communicable disease reports."

Experience tells us that it takes practice to find the "best practice." PHF is seeking clients to partner with PHF in results-oriented projects that apply promising QI techniques to public health problems, then evaluate their effectiveness. You benefit from PHF's expertise, training, and assistance to accelerate your performance improvement project, and the public health field will benefit from the lessons we learn together. For an example of such a project, see the Orange County Quality Improvement Project below. To initiate a project, you will need:

• Defined public health problem(s)
• Top leadership support for improvement
• A project manager
• A logistical coordinator or support person
• Ability to assign or recruit individuals to participate regularly in the QI team(s)
• Funding to cover PHF involvement and other expenses (Consider a state or local private foundation, hospital "conversion fund," or program grant)
• An evaluator (such as an academic partner or public health institute)

These collaborative, technical assistance projects build on methods, concepts, and materials developed by leading quality and performance improvement groups such as the American Society for Quality, Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Goal QPC, ASTD, PHF, and Turning Point. For more information, contact Jacalyn Carden.

Orange County Quality Improvement Project

PHF successfully completed a quality improvement (QI) project with the Orange County, Florida whereby QI techniques were used to help local health department teams solve important public health problems. In this innovative project, the Orange County Health Department (OCHD) STD team actively used QI techniques to curb the growing syphilis problem in their community, and the HIV team applied similar techniques to look at increasing access to early HIV care throughout Orange County. In addition, the QI project helped the STD team tackle and successfully address problems they were facing in retaining qualified workers. PHF’s role in this project included: facilitating QI "learning and working" sessions with two teams, providing and tailoring QI materials appropriate to public health, assisting with identifying performance measures and standards, offering technical assistance on public health improvement strategies, and participating in milestone meetings with the project teams. PHF also arranged for two local QI consultants to work weekly with each team over three to four months, helping them apply techniques and determine which approaches get the best results. The project was evaluated by Florida State University College of Medicine, Center for Medicine and Public Health, with positive results. 

Orange County leaders, already committed to QI, were encouraged by the outcome of the QI project and hopes the project will help them spread success and enthusiasm to other units. The OCHD wants to expand the QI project to other departments by extending the funding received from the Winter Park Health Foundation to a second year, with the health department providing partial support.

For more information, contact Jacalyn Carden.

Communicating the Value of Public Health Agencies
in Preparedness

In 2004, PHF assisted the National Association of County and City Health Officials in a project to help local public health agencies better understand and communicate what they bring to their communities' bioterrorism and emergency preparedness efforts.  Selected local public health agency leaders worked in partnership with experts and representatives from other sectors to clarify messages and case examples of ways public health agencies share an important role in community preparedness.

The project resulted in two tip sheets, which can be purchased from NACCHO:

• Communicating Effectively with First Responders
• Recruiting Community Volunteers and Businesses for Emergency Preparedness

For more information, please e-mail Jacalyn Carden.

1. Online clearinghouse that includes stories and models from the field, tools, tips, and links for a variety of health planning areas:

• Good Health/Good Economy
• Planning for a Healthy RC/EZ/EC
• Mobilizing Partnerships and Making Contacts
• Working on Priority Health Issues
• Evaluating Your Efforts
• Funding

2. Technical assistance which RC/EZ/ECs could contact PHF staff for health planning assistance such as:

• Health data requests and interpretation
• Obtaining health improvement topic specific resources, materials, and best practices for interventions
• Developing health improvement advisory groups
• Mobilizing health partnerships
• Making contacts with federal, state, and local agencies and community organizations
• Assessing and prioritizing health needs and assets
• Planning, implementing, and evaluating health plans and activities

3. An audioconference focused on health insurance issues. As a result of the audioconference’s success, an in-person conference highlighting 3-Share Health Coverage Models was held on May 30-31, 2002, in Muskegon, Michigan. RC/EZ/ECs from around the country attended the conference and learned how Muskegon’s 3-Share Model works.

Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities
Health Benchmarking Demonstration Project

PHF, with funding from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, assisted three Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities (EZ/ECs) in assessing health needs and assets and subsequently in developing health improvement plans. The demonstration sites were Wilmington, Delaware; New Haven, Connecticut; and Denver, Colorado.

To assist these communities in identifying community health priorities and in setting and achieving an action-oriented set of goals, technical assistance was provided:

• Consultation was provided both on- and off-site to fill gaps in needed expertise, to provide services not otherwise available, or to be a guide through unfamiliar tasks.
• Examples of best practices and additional reference materials were assembled to assist each site in crafting health benchmarks appropriate for their community.
• Federal partners were involved to provide expertise in areas such as informatics, access to care, and available resources.

This 1998-1999 demonstration project provided insight into how health issues and strategies for improving health can be integrated into community economic development initiatives. 

The project has documented lessons learned about EZ/EC health improvement planning so that communities throughout the United States can use them.

EZ/EC Project Findings and Tools on the Web

Building Healthy RC/EZ/ECs Information and Tools to Link Health Improvement to Economic and Community Development Enter Archive Site

EZ/EC Health Planning Capacity Survey: Final Report, a report providing results of the survey that assessed EZ/EC efforts to improve health, their interest and capacity to undertake health improvement planning, and what types of assistance could help EZ/ECs better address health as part of their economic revitalization efforts.

Improving Health in Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities: Lessons Learned from the EZ/EC Health Benchmarking Demonstration Project, a report highlighting 12 lessons learned, opportunities, and challenges of undertaking a community health improvement process. 

Tools and Resources from the Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC) Health Benchmarking Demonstration Project, a compilation of the tools and resources used.

For more information, please e-mail Jennifer Stanley.

Back to Top

Updated 4-14-08