Houston is struggling with many of the environmental problems that most of the nation's major metropolitan areas are struggling with - transportation, water and air pollution, flooding, and major demographic changes. Therefore, Houston provided an excellent site for a regional meeting on the relationship between environment and health. The purpose of this workshop in Houston was to bring all the stakeholders together - the private and public sector, along with representatives of the diverse communities in Houston - to discuss the impact of the natural, built, and social environments on human health. Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment summarizes the presentations and discussions of this workshop. The lessons one may draw from this meeting's presentations and discussions apply to other regions that are undergoing similar changes and that must also contend, as does Houston, with the legacies of insufficient planning, environmentally deficient planning, or sometimes, no planning at all.

The purpose of this regional workshop in the Southeast was to broaden the environmental health perspective from its typical focus on environmental toxicology to a view that included the impact of the natural, built, and social environments on human health. Early in the planning, Roundtable members realized that the process of engaging speakers and developing an agenda for the workshop would be nearly as instructive as the workshop itself. In their efforts to encourage a wide scope of participation, Roundtable members sought input from individuals from a broad range of diverse fields-urban planners, transportation engineers, landscape architects, developers, clergy, local elected officials, heads of industry, and others. This workshop summary captures the discussions that occurred during the two-day meeting. During this workshop, four main themes were explored: (1) environmental and individual health are intrinsically intertwined; (2) traditional methods of ensuring environmental health protection, such as regulations, should be balanced by more cooperative approaches to problem solving; (3) environmental health efforts should be holistic and interdisciplinary; and (4) technological advances, along with coordinated action across educational, business, social, and political spheres, offer great hope for protecting environmental health. This workshop report is an informational document that provides a summary of the regional meeting.

Offers vivid narratives illuminating the challenges and opportunities health professionals and policymakers face Distinguished by abundant patient and health provider narratives highlighting the impact of health disparities on health outcomes worldwide, this scholarly yet practical text prepares RN-BSN, DNP, and PhD students to work toward improving community health for a variety of underserved and vulnerable populations. Grounded in the population health approach addressed in AACN Essentials, the text delivers practical steps nurses can take to address population health goals, including the improvement of quality of care, access to healthcare, improved outcomes, and cost management. The resource is also unique in its reflection of the interconnected points of view of the patient, the provider, and the health system. Written by lawyers, physicians, social workers, statisticians and economists, psychologists, ethicists, finance experts, population health specialists, anthropologists, and nurses, the text emphasizes an interdisciplinary approach to learning and all components of health care—delivery of care, policy, research, and teaching. It examines demographic differences, chronic and acute health conditions, and the health needs of the unserved/underserved across the life cycle. The book emphasizes the importance of understanding the social determinants of health and discusses ways to address health disparities through changes in public policy, attitudes, beliefs, education, research, and advocacy. Objectives, key terms, discussion questions, and exercises facilitate group discussion about best practices. Key Features: Delivers practical knowledge with detailed narratives and case studies of specific populations from experienced interprofessional authors Highlights the interwoven perspectives of patients, health providers, and health systems to promote cultural competence Pinpoints health disparities including a discussion of COVID-19 Presents selected historical landmarks and cases that influence population health outcomes among vulnerable groups Interdisciplinary approach includes the perspectives of other health and social science disciplines

This thoroughly updated Fifth Edition is a comprehensive, practical guide to recognizing, preventing, and treating work-related and environmentally-induced injuries and diseases. Chapters by experts in medicine, industry, labor, government, safety, ergonomics, environmental health, and psychology address the full range of clinical and public health concerns. Numerous case studies, photographs, drawings, graphs, and tables help readers understand key concepts. This edition features new chapters on environmental health, including water pollution, hazardous waste, global environmental hazards, the role of nongovernmental organizations in environmental health, and responding to community environmental health concerns. Other new chapters cover conducting workplace investigations and assessing and enforcing compliance with health and safety regulations.

This report is the summary of the fourth workshop of The Roundtable on Environmental Health Sciences, Research, and Medicine. Environmental Indicators: Bridging the Chasm Between Public Health and the Environment, continues the overarching themes of previous workshops on rebuilding the unity of health and the environment. The purpose of the workshop was to bring people together from many fields, including federal, state, local, and private partners in environmental health, to examine potential leading indicators of environmental health, to discuss the proposed national health tracking effort, to look into monitoring systems of other nations, and to foster a dialogue on the steps for establishing a nationwide environmental health monitoring system. This workshop brought together a number of experts who presented, discussed, and debated the issues surrounding the implementation of a monitoring system.

This is a summary of the workshop Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the Environment: A New Vision of Environmental Health for the 21st Century. The goal of this workshop was to emphasize the connection between human health and the natural, built, and social environments. This workshop integrated talks from many fields and created a dialogue among various environmental health stakeholders. The language presented in this respect should not be viewed as an endorsement by the Environmental Health Sciences Roundtable or the Institute of Medicine of what action is needed for the future, but rather as an effort to synthesize the various perspectives presented.

Interest in environmental health research conducted with community participation has increased dramatically in recent years. In this book, Doug Brugge and H. Patricia Hynes relate experience of multiple community collaborations across the United States and highlight the lessons to be learned for those involved in or embarking on community-collaborative research. The volume brings together a variety of cases, examining the nature and form that the collaboration took, the scientific findings from the work and the ethical issues that needed to be addressed. Actual cases covered include lead contaminated soil, asthma and housing conditions, the impact of development on environmental health, the impact of radiation hazards, urban gardening, hog farming and diesel exhaust. The concluding section analyses the experiences of those involved and puts their findings into broader context. Community Research in Environmental Health: Lessons in Science, Advocacy and Ethics provides a valuable guide for all those interested and involved in community research.

The concept of “environmental security” has emerged as one basis for understanding international conflicts. This phrase can mean a variety of things. It can signify security issues stemming from environmental concerns or conflicting needs, or it can mean that the environment is treated as a resource for the long term, and the question is what should be done today to preserve the quality of the environment in the future. In the same way that energy security is about ensuring access to energy for the long run, it can also mean that pressing environmental concerns create a situation where different countries and communities are forced to collaboratively design a unified response, even if cooperation is not generally in the logic of their relations. Over the last several years, the authors of this book and their colleagues have tried to demonstrate the power of risk assessment and decision analysis as valuable tools that decision makers should use for a broad range of environmental problems, including environmental security. Risk analysis is almost more a state of mind or a way of looking at problems than it is a kind of algorithm or a set of recipes. It projects a kind of rationality on problems and forces a certain degree of quantitative rigor, as opposed to the all too common tendency of making environmental recommendations based on anecdotal evidence.