CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — 3News continues to follow the breakup of our City County Health District and on Thursday 3News worked to get an idea of what the city’s new health district needs to do in 2022 to get accredited.
As 3News looked into the process we learned the current City County Health District does not have national accreditation and neither does the state of Texas.
Even though Texas is one of ten states without accreditation the five largest Texas cities are all accredited as are eight Texas cities overall.
Those cities include:
- Austin Public Health (Austin)
- Dallas County Health and Human Services (Dallas)
- Harris County Public Health (Houston)
- Houston Health Department (Houston)
- San Antonio Metropolitan Health District (San Antonio)
- Tarrant County Public Health (Fort Worth)
- Williamson County and Cities Health District (Georgetown)
- Denton County Public Health (Denton)
So, what does accreditation mean? It means your health district meets national standards. The Public Health Accreditation Board President and CEO Paul Kuehnert says the public health community sets those standards in consultation with policy makers like the CDC. It helps medical experts agree on what key public health performance means, but states and health districts don’t have to join.
"Public health accreditation right now in our country is voluntary. What I would point out to you is we have right now about 80 percent of our states so 40 out of the 50 states are accredited and we have about 300 local health departments across the country that are accredited,” said Kuehnert.
There are close to three thousand health departments in the U.S., but some smaller health departments are *not eligible for accreditation because they do not provide comprehensive public health services.
The board says every state and health department or district in the country is eligible for voluntary accreditation.