Field of Work: Bringing public health assessment, accreditation and quality improvement to new states.

Problem Synopsis: In 2002, the Institute of Medicine noted in The Future of the Public's Health that although health care organizations and other governmental agencies such as police, fire and schools had mechanisms for accreditation and quality assurance, public health did not. According to the report: "Accreditation mechanisms may help to ensure the robustness and efficiency of the governmental public health infrastructure, assure the quality of public health services, and transparently provide information to the public about the quality of the services delivered."

Synopsis of the Work: Beginning in 2005, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) sponsored selected states with experience in public health assessment, accreditation and quality improvement to continue this work and share their experiences with other states through three phases of the Multistate Learning Collaborative (MLC)—July 2005 through December 2011 (the program has been renamed Lead States in Quality Improvement). The first phase (MLC-1) also informed RWJF's Exploring Accreditation project, during which a national steering committee composed of public health practitioners and leaders concluded that a voluntary national accreditation program was desirable and feasible.

Key Results:

• MLC states provided empirical, practical information about what worked and what did not to the Exploring Accreditation steering committee—thus contributing to its decision to recommend that a national voluntary public health accreditation program for state and local health departments be implemented.
  
  It also informed the work of the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB), established in 2007 by RWJF and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to manage and promote the national voluntary public health accreditation program.
• MLC's national program office at the National Network of Public Health Institutes raised the visibility of accreditation among public health departments in states that were not participating in the program by informing the public health community about accreditation through reports, guides, e-newsletters, webinars, presentations at national meetings, and journal articles that were published in two issues of the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice.