The St. Mary’s County Health Department (SMCHD) achieved national accreditation through the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB), jointly supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, on May 14, 2021. PHAB is the nonprofit organization that administers the national accreditation program for health departments. Accreditation aims to advance and transform public health practice by championing performance improvement, evidence-based action, and innovation.
Public health accreditation is a voluntary national program developed to measure health department performance against an established set of nationally recognized, practice-focused, and evidenced-based standards. The national accreditation program sets standards which the nation’s more than 3,000 governmental public health departments can work towards by continuously improving the quality of their services. To receive accreditation, a health department must undergo a rigorous, multi-faceted, peer-reviewed assessment to ensure it meets or exceeds a set of quality standards and measures. During this process, SMCHD documented conformance with all 100 performance measures across twelve domains of public health practice.
