Environmental Public Health Performance Standards (EnvPHPS)

Environmental health programs: Use EnvPHPS to help make your environmental public health program more effective.

EnvPHPS establishes standards to help you assess and improve your performance and capacity to provide the 10 Essential Environmental Public Health Services in your community. These 10 services identify needed actions to protect and improve environmental public health.

Explore our EnvPHPS resources.

EnvPHPS (v 2.0)[PDF – 1.03 MB] – background on standards to which all environmental health systems should aspire, and instructions for completing the assessment
Environmental Public Health Program Self-assessment Instrument[PDF – 228 KB] – tool to assess your program or system’s activity level for each Essential Environmental Public Health Service
EnvPHPS Assessment Toolkit – tools to help you prepare for, conduct, and follow up on your assessment

How Can EnvPHPS Help Environmental Health Programs?

Using EnvPHPS can help environmental health programs

assess the capacity of their program (or the larger environmental health) to perform the Essential Environmental Public Health Services,
identify critical gaps in performance,
create an action plan to address gaps and barriers to meeting the EnvPHPS, and
educate staff and community partners about the role of environmental health in preventing disease and reducing hazards, and the infrastructure necessary to fulfill that role.

The information obtained from completing the instrument can be used to

track and measure accomplishment,
approach decision-makers with information regarding the steps necessary to improve the environmental health system or program, and
justify continued or expanded services, support for training, or additional staff.

EH programs have also used the EnvPHPS to integrate EH into public health accreditation planning. Health departments seeking accreditation must submit a recent community health assessment, community health improvement plan (CHIP), and agency strategic plan before applying. The EnvPHPS Self-assessment instrument can be used to identify service gaps, and the action plans to address these deficiencies can be rolled into the larger improvement plan required for accreditation.