The Protocol for Assessing Community Excellence in Environmental Health (PACE EH) offers local health officials guidance in conducting a community-based environmental health assessment and creating an accurate and verifiable profile of the community's environmental health status. The process is designed to improve decision making by taking a collaborative community-based approach to generating an action plan that is based on a set of priorities that reflect both an accurate assessment of local environmental health status and an understanding of public values and priorities. The methodology takes the user through a series of tasks to engage the public, collect necessary and relevant information related to community environmental health concerns, rank issues, and set local priorities for action. At the heart are three core processes: developing new relationships with community stakeholders, expanding understanding about the relationship between human health and the state of the environment, and redefining a leadership role for public health officials in environmental health. The methodology entails the steps outlined below to answer the necessary questions in determining community priorities for action: Task 1: Determine Community Capacity to Undertake the Assessment; Task 2: Define and Characterize the Community; Task 3: Assemble Community Environmental Health Assessment Team; Task 4: Define the Goals of the Assessment; Task 5: Generate the Environmental Health Issue List; Task 6: Analyze Issues with a Systems Framework; Task 7: Develop Appropriate Community Environmental Health Indicators; Task 8: Select Standards; Task 9: Create Environmental Health Issue Profiles; Task 10: Rank the Environmental Health Issues; What are the biggest/most serious problems in our community?; Task 11: Set Priorities for Action; Task 12: Develop an Action Plan; Task 13: Evaluate Progress and Plan for the Future. While the methodology is laid out sequentially, it is meant to be flexible. In reality, this is an iterative and fluid process that can be taken in as many different directions as there are communities. While every community must chart its own course, PACE EH provides a starting point and some guidance on the primary tasks in a community based environmental health assessment. Presented through a mix of philosophy, practical guidance, and lessons from the field, PACE EH provides guidance not only on conducting an assessment but also on providing a new form of leadership, based on new relationships and partnerships with others in the community, to create healthy communities. In practice, the outcomes and benefits are as much about establishing a leadership role for local health officials and building a sustainable community process for decision making as they are about conducting a community-based environmental health assessment.

How do communities protect and improve the health of their populations? Health care is part of the answer but so are environmental protections, social and educational services, adequate nutrition, and a host of other activities. With concern over funding constraints, making sure such activities are efficient and effective is becoming a high priority. Improving Health in the Community explains how population-based performance monitoring programs can help communities point their efforts in the right direction. Within a broad definition of community health, the committee addresses factors surrounding the implementation of performance monitoring and explores the "why" and "how to" of establishing mechanisms to monitor the performance of those who can influence community health. The book offers a policy framework, applies a multidimensional model of the determinants of health, and provides sets of prototype performance indicators for specific health issues. Improving Health in the Community presents an attainable vision of a process that can achieve community-wide health benefits.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Interest in environmental health research conducted with community participation has increased dramatically in recent years. In this book, Doug Brugge and H. Patricia Hynes relate experience of multiple community collaborations across the United States and highlight the lessons to be learned for those involved in or embarking on community-collaborative research. The volume brings together a variety of cases, examining the nature and form that the collaboration took, the scientific findings from the work and the ethical issues that needed to be addressed. Actual cases covered include lead contaminated soil, asthma and housing conditions, the impact of development on environmental health, the impact of radiation hazards, urban gardening, hog farming and diesel exhaust. The concluding section analyses the experiences of those involved and puts their findings into broader context. Community Research in Environmental Health: Lessons in Science, Advocacy and Ethics provides a valuable guide for all those interested and involved in community research.