Key Environmental Health Competencies for Rural Primary Care Providers. Final Report

摘要

Providing health care that considers environmental determinants of health, environmental impact on health, and outcomes attributed to environmental issues is complex due to the need for providers to be competent not only in social and health sciences, but also in environmental health concepts. Primary health care providers in rural communities must be able to assess community environmental needs, perform problem analysis, program planning and implementation, and develop evaluation strategies. However, few primary health care providers are trained in environmental health conditions and history taking, even though poor environmental quality is estimated to be directly responsible for a significant proportion of preventable ill health in the world. The development of key environmental health competencies for rural primary care providers was undertaken systematically, first through a review of discipline specific competencies developed by a variety of entities including departments of environmental and public health, professional organizations, education organizations, and others. Numerous sources were obtained through searches in a variety of databases and various search terms. Investigators used a rigorous process for reviewing all the potentially relevant abstracts using the formal study inclusion/exclusion criteria. After full evaluation of all selected papers, items of interest extracted were competencies from multiple health care disciplines including medicine, nursing, epidemiology, environmental and occupational medicine, and public health. The purpose of this study was to develop a set of basic environmental health competencies that are needed by all rural primary care providers to direct health care and education policy.