EHA Talking Circle

Community health assessments (CHA) are used to identify key health needs and issues through systematic, comprehensive data collection, and analysis. Commonly these assessments focus on disease and injuries causes the most health risk in the community of focus. Determinants of health are also included in a CHA. These determinants may include environmental factors. However the inclusion of a full environmental assessment in a CHA is very uncommon. Despite the potential of CHAs to assess cumulative impacts, limited environmental data weakens their effectiveness. The Lumbee Tribe recently conducted a Tribal Health Assessment and it included only one question about environmental quality. This research aims to identify what should be included in a future Tribal Environmental Health Assessment.