10 Feb A slide providing your names

PUBH6034 Environmental Health: Local to Global

Module 6 Assignment

Town Hall Meeting: Presentation and Discussion

Note: The Town Hall Meeting Presentation has two parts:

Part 1: Create Your Presentation (in the Town Hall Meeting Group Wiki area, 150 points)

Part 2: Town Hall Meeting Team Reflection and Review (Email to your Instructor)

A Town Hall meeting is an informal event that is open to the members of a community, usually designed to address a topic of concern. The public has the opportunity to ask questions and the community leadership can get a better understanding of what concerns are most important to the community. In this module, you and your team role play both sides of a Town Hall Meeting by:

Presenting an environmental health issue with your team members.

Responding to questions from the concerned community (your non team-member colleagues).

Assuming the viewpoint of the community when you respond to other teams’ presentations.

Part 1: Create Your Presentation (Wiki area)

Develop your presentation as if you were presenting it in a Town Hall Meeting for the public at a local community center. In this Town Hall Meeting, you are involved on both sides of an environmental health issue. Assume you are part of a team of public health specialists employed at a state health department or ministry of health. In this role, you and your team members are responsible for assessing the scenario you received from your Instructor in Module 1 for the associated health risk to the population, and for conveying that information to members of a community who are concerned about this environmental health issue.

The guiding questions you need to address in this presentation are related to the core functions of public health and the 10 Essential Public Health Services. You should rely on the resources for this course as well as the background gained from your prior public health coursework to develop your narrated slide presentation. You may wish to review prior policy, epidemiology, program evaluation, or other relevant coursework. Create a slide presentation and narrate it using your computer microphone or other means of capturing audio. Use your team’s Town Hall Meeting Group Wiki area to build your presentation as a team. Remember to use the Comment button to add your comments or the Edit Wiki Content button to edit the wiki page so that your contributions are recognized.

The quality of the environment is inexorably linked to human health and protecting the environment is an important goal in many countries. Understating the complex and interrelated environmental factors and systems that contribute to population health and disease protection is essential in public health practice. Responding to complex public health challenges requires understanding of the interplay between the environment, disease, public health, policy and the community. As an example, assessment and monitoring of environmental impacts related to production and consumption of resources is critically important to protecting public health. Agencies may regulate the storage, transport, and disposal of hazardous wastes, and public health entities may establish preparedness programs for environmental impacts associated with natural disasters. Less developed parts of the world however may lack environmental and public health infrastructure, presenting unique challenges. In this module, you focus on solutions and assess ways that these impacts can be mitigated or prevented by using a systems thinking tools approach. You received a scenario in Module 1 and have been working with your team to develop the team contract, the progress report, and the presentation. In this module you finalize your slide presentation and present it in a simulated “Town Hall Meeting” as though you were presenting it for the public at a local community center.

The presentation must be 13–21 slides, not including references. The narration should take about one minute per slide, on average. To effectively educate your target audience (members of a concerned community), your presentation must include the following information and take into account a holistic public health view, as related to the connections among humans, zoonotic disease, and ecosystem health:

A title slide with the environmental health issue identified

A slide providing your names and the objectives of the presentation, assuring your audience of your team’s capacity to address this issue as competent representatives of a public health agency (each team member can introduce himself/herself)

2–3 slides to diagnose and investigate the hazard, describing the environmental health issue, and defining characteristics of possible exposures (e.g. what chemicals/hazards are present, what human health issues may be caused by the chemicals/hazards in question, fate/transport, environmental & biological persistence