December 12th, 2017
There is a growing awareness among health and housing experts that a coordinated, comprehensive, systematic, and holistic approach to residential health and safety hazards is more cost effective and prevention effective than a categorical approach. The National Healthy Homes Training Center and Network cross-trains environmental, health, and housing professionals in the discipline of “healthy housing.” The training initiative takes into account the scientific evidence connecting housing and health; the prevalence of hazards and the burden of associated illness or injury; and the availability of practical, low-cost, and reliable methods and protocols for assessing and treating housing-related health and safety hazards. The overarching purpose of the initiative, which is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is to increase the competency of the public health, environmental health, and housing workforces in the area of healthy housing and to motivate policy change in the way housing inAmerica is developed, renovated, and maintained. The training center provides participants with an opportunity to learn key healthy housing principles; a forum for exchanging information on healthy housing strategies; a mechanism for introducing new research into practice; and opportunities for networking, collaboration, and partnerships. Because less than half of the public health workforce in the United States has formal public health education, the training is also part of a broader national agenda to strengthen the public health infrastructure. The training will be delivered through a network of geographically dispersed, regionally based, university partners and will include the use of distance learning technology. This paper describes the methods used for developing the training center initiative and how the initiative contributes to the broader goal of preventing housing-related disease and injury by reconnecting the health, housing, and environmental disciplines to improve the quality of services delivered to theAmerican public through workforce development, capacity building, and policy dissemination.