Pierce County EH Indicators Project Process
Why a Pierce County Environmental Health Indicators Project?
The Tacoma-Pierce County Environmental Health Program heard from focus group participants that we should communicate information about environmental health in a simple report and a more technical report. We used environmental health issues identified by the focus group participants to develop a simple report, Pierce County, Your Environment – Your Health.
What data should go into a more technical report?
In June 2006 many agency and community members began the process to select environmental health indicators. They decided to form 5 workgroups to select indicators for 5 categories identified by focus group participants: air, water, food, land use, and waste. An additional workgroup was suggested and included: zoonotic diseases (diseases from animals).
Between August and December 2006 the 6 workgroups:
- Reviewed and improved an Environmental Health Indicators Model
- Reviewed others' and brainstormed a list of indicators they'd select from
- Reviewed others' and identified their own criteria for selecting indicators
In January 2007 workgroup participants and others met to review all the indicators selected. Most agreed that the list was too long for a report people would read, some wanted to include all the indicators. Staff suggested indicators from each category to remove. Some participants approved this, none objected.
Health department staff drafted the report text based on workgroup discussions and additional research. To help make these reports more meaningful and useful to a wide range of people, we invited focus group participants, health department, and other agency and community members to review report drafts. Many changes were made, including removal of a few more indicators.
We hired a graphic designer, Julie Almquist, to create icons for the indicators, a colorful cover, and an environmental health indicators model graphic.
Workgroup members and project staff do not intend for this report to be a comprehensive description of Pierce County environmental health. It provides a core set of indicators that we hope provide small windows onto the bigger, more complex world we live in and share. We hope they show connections between human and ecosystem health, and connections between air, water, land, food, animals, and people. In future reports we hope to have more data and be able to show more trends.
