Date Available
4-21-2025
Year of Publication
2025
Document Type
Graduate Capstone Project
Degree Name
Master of Public Health (M.P.H.)
College
Public Health
Department/School/Program
Public Health
Faculty
Anna Goodman Hoover
Committee Member
Florence Fulk
Faculty
Erin Haynes
Abstract
Rural communities are staffed by environmental health practitioners with less formal public health training and fewer years of public health experience. The literature on environmental health program implementation in rural communities is incomplete and specifically misses the perspectives of those charged with developing and fielding such programs. The purpose of this paper is to gather and report the insights of three rural local public health department leaders regarding the challenges, opportunities and stakeholders for implementing environmental health programs. Using purposive sampling of faculty community partners, three rural Kentucky local health department directors were recruited to participate in the study. After conducting informed consent, each rural local health director participated in a semi-structured, one-hour Zoom interview. An abductive codebook was created featuring topics related to the three primary functions of environmental health described in the literature. Transcriptions subsequently were analyzed via constant comparative analysis. The rural local health directors discussed all three categories of competencies in the interviews with management and communication competencies being raised by all respondents more frequently than assessment competencies. This study shows that the perspective of rural local health directors is that the training of environmental health specialists should include competencies in communication and management.
Recommended Citation
Rastegar, Michelle, "Environmental Health Priorities in Rural Public Health Departments: Perspectives from Health Agency Directors" (2025). Theses and Dissertations--Public Health (M.P.H. & Dr.P.H.). 455.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cph_etds/455
