| Course | MPH 500 Introduction to Public Health Systems, Organizations, & Practice |
|---|---|
| Week | 3 |
| Paper type | Agency profile |
| Length | About 1,100 words, 5 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Chamberlain University |
| Program | Master of Public Health (MPH) |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for MPH 500 Week 3
Agency Profile: The Harbor County Health Department's Division of Environmental Health, What It Delivers, Whom It Reaches and What It Cannot Do About Building Water
Student Name
Chamberlain University
MPH 500: Introduction to Public Health Systems, Organizations, & Practice
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Agency Profile: The Harbor County Health Department's Division of Environmental Health, What It Delivers, Whom It Reaches and What It Cannot Do About Building Water
Legal Status First
The Division of Environmental Health is a unit of the Harbor County Health Department, a county department created under the state's public health statute. The department's director is appointed by the county administrator, and the county board of health, a seven-member appointed body, adopts health regulations within the authority the state statute delegates. That authority covers food service, swimming pools, onsite wastewater, body art and public health nuisances. Anything outside those categories, including a requirement that building owners register and maintain cooling towers, needs an ordinance adopted by the elected county board of commissioners. The distinction matters more than anything else in this profile: the division can enforce only what a regulation or ordinance already gives it.
Staff and Structure
The division employs 26 people: a director of environmental health, two supervisors, 19 registered environmental health specialists and 4 support staff. Specialists are assigned by program rather than by geography, so the 11 who inspect restaurants rarely see a pool and the 3 assigned to complaints handle everything from sewage overflows to rodent infestations. None has trained in building water systems, and the division owns no equipment for sampling water for Legionella; during outbreaks, the state laboratory supplies kits and staff.
Programs and What They Deliver
Table 1
Division of Environmental Health Programs, Harbor County, 2025
| Program | What it delivers | Volume in 2025 | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food service | Permits and inspects restaurants and retail food | 2,140 establishments; 3,420 inspections | Board of health regulation |
| Pools and spas | Permits and inspects public pools, including chemistry and disinfection | 412 permitted pools; 900 inspections | Board of health regulation |
| Onsite wastewater | Permits and inspects septic systems | 610 permits | State statute and regulation |
| Public health nuisances | Responds to complaints about sewage, pests, mold and unsanitary conditions | 1,180 complaints | State statute |
| Body art | Permits and inspects tattoo and piercing studios | 64 studios | Board of health regulation |
| Outbreak support | Environmental sampling and source investigation during disease outbreaks | 6 investigations, including 1 Legionnaires' cluster | State statute, on request of the epidemiology program |
Note. Note. Volumes from the division's 2025 annual report. Harbor County is a composite.
Swimming pools are the closest parallel to cooling towers in the division's work: both are warm water systems that need disinfection, and the division already knows how to permit, inspect and enforce chemistry standards for pools. It has no equivalent program for any other building water system, including decorative fountains, hot water systems in large buildings or the cooling towers that serve offices, hotels and apartment complexes across the county.
How the Division Performed in the 2025 Cluster
The division's role in the August 2025 cluster of nine Legionnaires' cases shows both its strength and its limit. Within a day of the epidemiology program's request, two specialists were walking the industrial district with the state laboratory's sampling kits. They located 14 cooling towers by looking at rooftops from the street and from a parking garage, obtained owners' permission to sample 11, and had results within ten days; none matched the isolates from the patients. Staff estimated that at least another 20 towers stood within the search radius, which they could not find without building plans or a registry. The division did everything its authority and equipment allowed, and did it quickly. The investigation still ended without a source, and the cluster stopped only when the weather cooled in September, not because anything had been fixed.
Eligible Against Reached
The nuisance program illustrates the gap between who is eligible and who is reached. Every resident of the county is eligible for a response to a public health nuisance. In practice, the program reaches only people who complain, and complaints come disproportionately from homeowners and from neighborhoods with active neighborhood associations. Renters in the county's older apartment complexes, who are most likely to live with poorly maintained building systems, filed 22% of complaints while making up 41% of households. And the program responds to conditions inside a resident's own space; it does not inspect shared mechanical systems on roofs. For building water specifically, the number of people the division reaches through routine work is effectively zero.
Funding and Its Restrictions
The division's 2025 budget was about $4.3 million. Permit and inspection fees provided $2.9 million, and county policy restricts each fee to the program that generates it, so pool fees pay for pool inspections and nothing else. The county general fund provided $1.1 million, mostly for the nuisance program and administration. A state environmental health grant provided $310,000, tied to meeting national retail food standards. None of these sources can be used for building water oversight without either a new fee, which requires a new regulation or ordinance, or a decision by the county board to reallocate general funds.
Partnerships and Referral
The division works routinely with four partners. The city building department refers complaints about structural and plumbing problems under an informal agreement, and the division can request permit records. The state public health laboratory tests environmental samples during outbreaks. Hospital infection preventionists report suspected Legionnaires' cases to the epidemiology program, which brings the division in when an environmental source is suspected. And the regional apartment association distributes the division's notices to its member properties, which cover about half of the county's rental units.
A Constraint and Its Relief
The division's constraint for this problem is clear: no authority, no funding stream and no trained staff for building water systems outside healthcare facilities, which must manage their own under federal rules (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2017). The relief is also clear, and it follows the model the division already uses for pools. An ordinance requiring cooling tower registration, a maintenance plan and periodic testing, funded by an annual registration fee, would give the division authority, a restricted funding source and a reason to train two specialists. A city in another state used a local mandate of this kind for more than a decade and reported a fall in contaminated towers over time, with education of building managers central to its success (Whitney et al., 2017). The national consensus standard for building water management would supply the content of the maintenance requirement (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, 2018).
References
American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. (2018). Legionellosis: Risk management for building water systems (ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 188-2018).
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2017). Requirement to reduce Legionella risk in healthcare facility water systems to prevent cases and outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease (LD) (Ref: S&C 17-30). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Whitney, E. A., Blake, S., & Berkelman, R. L. (2017). Implementation of a Legionella ordinance for multifamily housing, Garland, Texas. Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, 23(6), 601-607. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000000518
What the MPH 500 Week 3 assignment asks for
Start with the organization's legal status and authority, because it determines what the agency can do. Keep mission and history brief. Spend the length on what someone working with the agency would need to know: its staff and structure, its programs with what each delivers and in what volume, the population actually reached set against the population nominally served, its funding with the restrictions attached to each source and its main partnerships and referral routes. Verify claims against reports or records rather than promotional material. Use a recent event to show how the agency performs in practice. Close with the main constraint the agency faces for your problem and a realistic relief that fits its existing capacity.
How the MPH 500 Week 3 example is put together
The sample's first section explains that the division enforces only what the board of health's regulations or a county ordinance allow, and that building water is outside both. Staff and structure follow, noting no water system training or sampling equipment. A table lists six programs with volumes from the 2025 annual report, and the text identifies the pool program as the nearest model. The 2025 cluster section describes specialists locating 14 towers from rooftops and garages while 20 more stayed hidden. The reach section compares renters' share of complaints with their share of households. Funding is broken into fees restricted by program, general funds and a food safety grant. Four partnerships are described, and relief is an ordinance with a fee modeled on pool permits.
MPH 500 Week 3 rubric: what full points look like
The commonest loss is the brochure: mission, values, history and a list of services taken from the organization's own material, with nothing checked against anything. The second is the population conflated, where eligibility is reported as though it described who actually receives the service. Marks are also lost for funding given as a total without the restrictions that decide what it can pay for, and for profiles that never say what the agency cannot do. Graders reward profiles that start with legal authority, quantify programs, compare eligible with reached, explain funding restrictions and close with a constraint and a realistic relief that builds on what the agency already does.
MPH 500 Week 3 help from the desk
Profiling an agency from the outside usually produces a summary of its website; this assignment wants what a partner would need to know. Share what you can find about the agency's authority, programs, budget and recent work, and the profile can lead with its legal powers, quantify each program, compare who is eligible with who is reached, explain how funding is restricted and end on a constraint and a relief. Using a recent event as evidence of how the agency actually performs strengthens the whole profile. The agency and its records are what you bring.
Get a MPH-500 Week 3 example written to your instructions
Send the Week 3 instructions with the template your section supplies and the organization you are profiling, and a custom example is written into that format and returned inside 24 to 48 hours. The first one is free. Which organization you profile is usually yours to choose.
More MPH 500 papers and MPH samples
- MPH 500 Week 1: Upstream Walk Post
- MPH 500 Week 2: Public Health Systems Analysis
- MPH 500 Week 4: Essential Services Analysis
- MPH 500 Week 5: Policy Brief
- MPH 500 Week 6: Stakeholder Analysis
- MPH 500 Week 7: Program Evaluation Plan
- MPH 500 Week 8: Synthesis Presentation
MPH 500 Week 3 questions, answered
Where do I find what an agency actually does?
Annual reports, program evaluations, grant documentation and any accreditation material, rather than the organization's own front page. Those documents are written for funders and regulators, which makes them far more informative about delivery. Where an agency publishes little, saying so is a finding about its transparency rather than a gap in your research.
Can I profile my own employer?
Check your section, since some encourage it and others prefer distance. Where it is allowed, work from public documents rather than internal knowledge, so every claim in the profile is something a reader could verify. Anything you know only from being inside the organization is difficult to cite and awkward to include in a graded document.
How do I get the population actually reached?
From service data where any is published, and from the difference between eligibility and enrollment where it is not. Many organizations report both without drawing the comparison. Making it explicit is usually the single most valuable paragraph in the profile, because it identifies who is entitled to a service and does not receive it.
Where can I find a free MPH 500 Week 3 sample paper?
A complete agency profile of a county Division of Environmental Health, focused on building water, can be read on this page.
Why does the MPH 500 Week 3 sample point to the pool program?
Pools are warm water systems the division already permits, inspects and tests for disinfection, making them the closest model for cooling tower oversight.