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 As a pilot site, the Logan County Health Department
will test and report on the best ways to evaluate essential public
health services like health assessment, disease investigation and
community engagement in health education and prevention.
"The Logan County Health Department has been
recognized for excellence in many of its programs, including Healthy
Families, Home Health, Breast and Cervical Cancer, and WIC/Family
Case Management, and we want to demonstrate the high quality of our
core community health services too. By being a part of this pilot
project, we will be able to assess our performance and hope to find
ways to do even better in helping Logan County residents get and
stay healthier," said Mark Hilliard, the administrator of the Logan
County Health Department. "We look forward to the community's
support as we conduct this process."
The program is part of a multiyear initiative in
Illinois to explore ways to measure and improve local health
department performance, and Logan County was selected to participate
by the Illinois Accreditation Development Task Force.
Over the coming months, the Logan County Health
Department will undertake a rigorous self-evaluation of its services
and programs against 50 nationally defined measures of fundamental
health department functions. Then the department will submit its
evidence of performance for review by an outside panel of experts.
After conducting the independent review, the expert panel will
assist the department in identifying areas of quality improvement.
The health department's leadership in this program is expected to
help improve the quality of services for Logan County residents.
Logan County was selected to participate in this
pilot project because of its extensive and widely acknowledged
commitment to excellence, its historical efforts related to meeting
standards and improving quality, and its leadership among Illinois
health departments in promoting the best public health practices.
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 "I applaud the Logan County Health Department for
participating in the Illinois accreditation pilot program and for
its efforts to improve the quality of the services it provides to
the residents of Logan County," said Eric F. Whitaker, M.D., M.P.H.,
director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.
The other six health departments participating in
the pilot project are Adams County Health Department, Kendall County
Health Department, Lake County Health Department, Clay County Health
Department, Peoria City/County Health Department and Winnebago
County Health Department. The participating agencies represent a
broad range of Illinois health departments, ranging in size from a
population of 14,000 (Clay County) to a population of 713,000 (Lake
County). Logan County has a population of about 31,000.
Across the country, public health experts are
working to establish standards and measures of health department
performance in order to achieve the common goal that all community
residents should expect and receive essential public health services
and that those services should be of the highest quality possible.
Illinois' exploratory accreditation program was
developed over the past year and a half by the Illinois
Accreditation Development Task Force, a partnership of state
agencies, local health departments, universities and other public
health stakeholders. The project is supported by funding from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is being undertaken in the
context of promotion by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the National Association of County and City Health
Officials of a new, national state and local health department
accreditation program.
[Text from file received
from the Illinois Public
Health Institute]
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