PHE 101 Module 3 Essential Services Short Paper Example

Ten Jobs, Five Staff: The Essential Public Health Services and Grain Bin Safety in Prairie Bend County

[Student Name]

Southern New Hampshire University

PHE 101: Fundamentals of Public Health

Module Three Short Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The organization, setting and figures below are a composite written as a model document. No real employer, client, colleague or patient is described.

Ten Jobs, Five Staff: The Essential Public Health Services and Grain Bin Safety in Prairie Bend County

Most people know their county health department for restaurant inspections and flu shots. Fewer know that public health agencies share a common description of their work, built around three core functions and ten essential services. This paper explains that framework and applies it to a problem the Prairie Bend County Health Department in north central Kansas has never addressed directly: deaths and injuries from entrapment in grain bins. The department has five staff, a part-time health officer and a budget built around clinic services and inspections. The question is not whether the framework is tidy but whether it helps a small department decide what to do.

Core Functions and Essential Services

Practitioners usually sort their work into three core functions. Assessment means learning what is happening to a population's health and why. Policy development means using that knowledge to shape rules, plans and priorities. Assurance means making sure that needed services and protections actually exist. The ten essential public health services break these functions into specific responsibilities. Published first in 1994, the list was rewritten in 2020 after a nationwide review that put equity in the middle of the diagram, a change recognizing that public health must address the conditions that leave some groups at greater risk. Castrucci (2021) argued that the revised services give the field a common language to explain what public health does to policy makers and the public, who often cannot describe it. The ten services cover assessing and monitoring health, investigating hazards, communicating, mobilizing partnerships, developing policies and plans, using legal and regulatory authority, assuring access to care, training a capable workforce, learning through study and evaluation, and keeping the agency itself sound.

Assessment Services Applied

The first two services ask the department to watch and investigate. Prairie Bend has no system for counting farm injuries; deaths reach the coroner, and injuries reach the volunteer fire departments and a regional hospital. Monitoring would start by pulling ten years of coroner, fire and hospital records for grain-related incidents and comparing them with the national surveillance kept at Purdue University, which Cheng et al. (2018) describe as the main source for agricultural confined space incidents. Investigating would mean reviewing last fall's two deaths with the families' permission: what grain condition led each man into the bin, whether he was alone, what equipment was available and how long rescuers took to arrive. The point is not blame but to find conditions that repeat.

Policy Development Services Applied

The next three services concern communication, partnerships and policy. Communication would avoid the tone of warning lectures and use the channels farmers already trust, such as the cooperative's newsletter, radio during harvest and the county extension office. Partnership is where a small department can multiply itself: the grain cooperative, the extension agent, two FFA chapters, the county's four volunteer fire departments and the regional hospital each hold a piece of the solution. Policy development would produce a county plan for harvest-season grain safety with those partners, including a goal that every fire district has access to a rescue tube and trained crews. Frieden (2010) argues that interventions that change the environment so the safe choice is the default reach more people than education alone, which points the plan toward equipment, such as sweep augers and bin breakers that work from outside the bin, rather than posters.

Assurance Services Applied

The last five services cover legal authority, access, workforce, evaluation and infrastructure. Legal authority is limited here; federal workplace safety rules for grain handling apply to commercial facilities, and small family farms are largely outside federal enforcement, so the department cannot inspect farm bins. Access to care in this case means rescue and trauma care: reaching a level one trauma unit takes an hour and a half, which makes on-scene rescue capacity critical. Workforce means training volunteer firefighters in grain rescue; Cheng et al. (2024) found that a national grain rescue course improved first responders' test scores and that some departments adopted new practices afterward, though gaps in understanding certain hazards remained. Evaluation means deciding in advance what will show progress, such as rescue tubes in place and crews trained. Infrastructure means giving one staff member responsibility for agricultural injury so the work survives the next budget.

Where to Start

Ten services cannot all begin at once in a department of five. A sensible sequence starts with the services that cost least and unlock the rest. Monitoring comes first, because a ten-year count of local grain incidents will tell commissioners and partners how large the problem really is and will make every later conversation more concrete. Partnership comes second, since the cooperative, extension office and fire districts already have staff, equipment and trust that the department lacks. The written plan comes third, built with those partners so they share ownership. Workforce and evaluation follow once the plan names who will be trained and what will be measured. This order also respects the department's other duties: the department can take every one of these steps with its present team, provided one person is given hours to lead them.

What the Department Can and Cannot Do

Applying all ten services to one problem shows something the framework does not say directly: a small department delivers some services itself and only convenes others. Prairie Bend's health department can monitor, investigate, communicate, convene partners, write a plan and evaluate. It cannot inspect farm bins, buy rescue equipment for fire districts or train firefighters itself. Those depend on partners. Equity matters here too: the people most at risk include teenage farm workers and seasonal laborers, who have the least say in how work is organized. The framework is most useful not as a checklist but as a way to see where the department's own work ends and its partners' begins.

Conclusion

The ten essential services give a five-person health department a map for a problem it has never owned. Assessment shows how often entrapment happens and why; policy development brings partners and environmental change to the front; assurance exposes the limits of authority and the importance of rescue capacity. The next step is to analyze the problem in depth, which the first project in Module Five will do.

References

Castrucci, B. C. (2021). The "10 Essential Public Health Services" is the common framework needed to communicate about public health. American Journal of Public Health, 111(4), 598-599. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306189

Cheng, Y.-H., Field, W. E., Issa, S. F., French, B. F., Ehlers, S. G., & Sheldon, E. J. (2024). Documenting baseline efficacy of grain rescue training for emergency first responders through pre- and post-testing, and follow-up survey. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health, 30(3), 123-138. https://doi.org/10.13031/jash.16012

Cheng, Y.-H., Field, W. E., Issa, S. F., Kelley, K., Heber, M., & Turner, R. (2018). Summary of U.S. injuries and fatalities involving entrapment and suffocation in grain transport vehicles. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health, 24(2), 73-88. https://doi.org/10.13031/jash.12479

Frieden, T. R. (2010). A framework for public health action: The health impact pyramid. American Journal of Public Health, 100(4), 590-595. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.185652