July 31, 2018

HOUSTON, Texas - The Houston Health Department (HHD) was honored with two Model Practice Awards and one Promising Practice Award at the 2018 Annual Conference of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) in July. The awards celebrate local health departments for developing programs that demonstrate exemplary and replicable best practices in response to a critical local public health need.

The Houston Community Capacity Building Pilot Project and the Innovative Strategy to Identify Infants Born to Chronic Hepatitis B Mothers were two of 29 local health department programs to receive NACCHO’s prestigious Model Practice Award. The department also received a NACCHO Promising Practice Award. The winning projects are:

Model Practice Awards:
1. Houston Community Capacity Building Pilot Project.

This project presented trainings and awarded mini-grants in three low-income communities to help residents learn to how to advocate for and improve their communities.

2. Innovative Strategy to Identify Infants Born to Chronic Hepatitis B Mothers.
Mothers who have hepatitis B can easily transmit this disease to their infants, so mothers are routinely screened for hepatitis B by medical providers in every pregnancy and the positive results are reported to the Houston Health Department. This project found that 4 out of every 10 infants born to these mothers were not reported in 2014 and 2015 and assessed the underlying reasons so this rate can be improved.

Promising Practice Award

Dialectical Program Planning Model—An Approach to Capacity Building in Planning and Evaluation of Public Health Programs and Projects.

This project presented trainings and awarded mini-grants in three low-income communities to help residents learn to how to advocate for and improve their communities.

“We are proud to receive NACCHO’s Model Practice Award. The award is evidence of our commitment to developing responsive and innovative public health programs that build capacity in our communities and improve the health and social well-being of all Houstonians,” said Stephen L. Williams, M.Ed., M.P.A., Director of the Houston Health Department.

Since 2003, NACCHO’s Model Practice Awards have honored programs, resources, and tools that demonstrate how local health departments and their community partners can effectively collaborate to address local public health challenges. Each innovative project receiving the Model Practice Award was peer-reviewed and selected from a competitive group of over 100 applicants.

"Today we honor the Houston Health Department for the exceptional programs they have developed to protect their community, as well as disseminate their results for the benefit of other communities. Inventive programs like theirs advance our profession by promoting science and evidence-informed work and we are very pleased to recognize their efforts with these Model Practice and Promising Practice Awards,” said NACCHO Chief Executive Officer Lori Tremmel Freeman, MBA.

The Houston Community Capacity Building Pilot Project and the Innovative Strategy to Identify Infants Born to Chronic Hepatitis B Mothers are now part of an online, searchable database of successful public health practices in areas that range from immunization and maternal and child health, to infectious diseases and emergency preparedness. The NACCHO Model Practice database allows local health departments, public health partners, and other important stakeholders to learn about the good work being done by local health departments across the country. The database also provides users an opportunity to learn from best practices and what resources are needed to implement comparable programs in other jurisdictions that produce results.