Section III: 10 Essential Public Health Services
This section of the toolkit is organized around the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 10 Essential Public Health Services. This framework describes the public health activities that all communities should undertake to ensure the health and safety of their citizens. Each of the services is designed to support one of three core functions of public health:
- Assessment
- Policy development
- Assurance (i.e., ensuring that people live in healthy conditions).
To achieve optimal health for all, these 10 essential services actively promote policies, systems, and services that enable good health and seek to remove obstacles and systemic and structure barriers, such as poverty, racism, gender, discrimination, and other forms of oppression that have resulted in health inequities.
For each of the 10 services described below, we present a brief overview of the key tasks associated with the service, some important considerations for implementing these tasks through an opioid prevention lens, and concrete steps boards of health can take to integrate opioid prevention into the service. We also present an example of how other Massachusetts communities are doing so.
