MPH 500 Week 4 Essential Services Analysis Example

Course	MPH 500 Introduction to Public Health Systems, Organizations, & Practice
Week	4
Paper type	Essential services analysis
Length	About 1,130 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 4

Essential Services Analysis: How Harbor County Performs the Ten Essential Public Health Services for Legionnaires' Disease From Building Water

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 500: Introduction to Public Health Systems, Organizations, & Practice

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What this page is doingThe title applies a named framework to one problem in one county, which signals that each service will be judged on evidence rather than described in general.

Essential Services Analysis: How Harbor County Performs the Ten Essential Public Health Services for Legionnaires' Disease From Building Water

The Framework and the Scale

This analysis uses the ten essential public health services in their updated 2020 form, which groups them under assessment, policy development and assurance and places equity at the center (Public Health National Center for Innovations, 2020). Each service is judged for one problem, Legionnaires' disease acquired from building water systems in Harbor County, home to 412,000 people in this composite and to 31 reported cases in 2025. A single three-point scale is used throughout. Performed means a named body does the service routinely with documented results. Partly performed means it happens, but only in response to events or for part of the problem. Not performed means no body does it. Each rating rests on something that exists or can be cited, not on impression.

The Services, Rated

Table 1

Ten Essential Public Health Services Applied to Legionnaires' Disease From Building Water, Harbor County

Service	Rating	Who performs it	Evidence
1. Assess and monitor population health	Partly	County epidemiology program; state surveillance	Cases counted and mapped; no inventory of the water systems that cause them
2. Investigate, diagnose and address hazards	Partly	Epidemiology program and environmental health division	Every case investigated; 2025 cluster source not found because towers could not be located
3. Communicate effectively	Partly	Health department communications	Press releases during the 2025 cluster; no routine guidance to building owners
4. Strengthen community partnerships	Partly	Environmental health division	Apartment association distributes notices; no partnership with water treatment vendors or office building managers
5. Create and champion policies	Not performed	None	No proposal for building water policy has been brought to the county board
6. Use legal and regulatory actions	Not performed	None	No ordinance or regulation covers cooling towers; imminent hazard power used only during outbreaks
7. Assure equitable access to care	Performed	Hospitals and clinics	Testing and treatment available; urine antigen testing standard in the three hospitals
8. Build a diverse and skilled workforce	Not performed	None	No environmental health specialist trained in building water systems
9. Improve and innovate through evaluation and research	Not performed	None	No evaluation of building water risk; no use of the 2025 cluster to change practice
10. Build and maintain a strong organizational infrastructure	Partly	Health department	Outbreak response capacity exists; no funding or data system for prevention

Note. Note. Ratings use one scale for all ten services. Evidence from county reports and the 2025 cluster investigation.

What this page is doingApplying one three-point scale to all ten services, with a stated basis for each rating, makes the judgments comparable and checkable.

What the Pattern Shows

The ratings cluster in a recognizable shape. The services the county performs, at least partly, are the ones that respond to cases: surveillance, investigation, communication during an outbreak and access to diagnosis and treatment. The services it does not perform are the ones that would prevent cases: policy, legal action, workforce training and evaluation. This is not a sign of poor performance by any individual or program. It reflects the structure described in earlier work, in which funding and authority are tied to responding to illness rather than preventing exposure.

Service 1: Assessment Without an Inventory

Surveillance counts cases well. The epidemiology program knows how many people became ill, where they live and when. What it cannot assess is exposure, because the county has no record of where its towers stand, who maintains them or whether they are tested. Assessment of a waterborne hazard without an inventory of the water systems is like assessing foodborne illness without a list of restaurants.

Service 2: Investigation That Cannot Finish

Every reported case is investigated within the required time. But investigation of the 2025 cluster ended without a source because investigators could locate only 14 of an estimated 35 towers near the cases. Investigations of this kind elsewhere have succeeded in identifying sources when a registry allowed rapid sampling of every tower in an area (Fitzhenry et al., 2017). The rating of partly performed reflects that the service runs but cannot reach its purpose for this problem.

Services 5 and 6: Policy and Law, Not Performed

No body has proposed or adopted a policy on building water. The county's legal powers allow it to act in an imminent hazard, which it did not need to use in 2025, but give it no routine authority over cooling towers. A federal review of outbreaks traced most of them to water management lapses that could have been prevented (Garrison et al., 2016), and lapses of that kind are reached at scale only through policy and law.

Equity Within the Ratings

The 2020 framework places equity at its center, and the ratings look worse when the cases are examined by place. Of the 31 cases in 2025, 17 lived in the three census tracts surrounding the county's older industrial and commercial district, which hold about 14% of the county's population and the highest share of renters. Residents there live and walk among rooftop towers serving warehouses and older apartment blocks, many of them on buildings whose owners do not live in the county. The services the county performs well, testing and treatment, reach these residents once they are ill. The services it does not perform, the ones that would make the water around them safer, are the ones that would reduce a burden they carry disproportionately. A rating of not performed for policy and law is therefore not neutral; it falls hardest on the neighborhoods with the most exposure.

What this page is doingLooking at where cases live turns the framework's equity principle into a specific finding about which neighborhoods the missing services would protect.

Gaps, Prioritized

Four gaps are ranked by how much each limits the others. First, legal authority, service 6, because without it no inventory, inspection or enforcement can happen. Second, assessment of exposure through a registry, service 1, because it would also make investigation, service 2, able to finish. Third, workforce, service 8, because a registry needs trained staff to review maintenance plans. Fourth, evaluation, service 9, because without it the county will not know whether any change worked. Communication and partnerships, services 3 and 4, matter but follow from the first three.

What this page is doingRanking the gaps by how much each one blocks the others turns a list of shortfalls into an order of work.

What Filling Them Requires

Filling the first three gaps requires a county ordinance requiring registration, maintenance plans and periodic testing of cooling towers, an annual registration fee to pay for oversight, and training for two environmental health specialists in building water systems. A voluntary national standard on managing risk in building water supplies the technical content (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, 2018). Filling the fourth requires an evaluation plan written before the ordinance takes effect, so that the registry's data can show whether contamination and cases fall.

References

American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. (2018). Legionellosis: Risk management for building water systems (ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 188-2018).

Fitzhenry, R., Weiss, D., Cimini, D., Balter, S., Boyd, C., Alleyne, L., Stewart, R., McIntosh, N., Econome, A., Lin, Y., Rubinstein, I., Passaretti, T., Kidney, A., Lapierre, P., Kass, D., & Varma, J. K. (2017). Legionnaires' disease outbreaks and cooling towers, New York City, New York, USA. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 23(11), 1769-1776. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2311.161584

Garrison, L. E., Kunz, J. M., Cooley, L. A., Moore, M. R., Lucas, C., Schrag, S., Sarisky, J., & Whitney, C. G. (2016). Vital signs: Deficiencies in environmental control identified in outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease: North America, 2000-2014. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 65(22), 576-584. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6522e1

Public Health National Center for Innovations. (2020). 10 essential public health services. https://phnci.org/national-frameworks/10-ephs

What the MPH 500 Week 4 assignment asks for

Name the edition of the framework you use and apply it as a checklist with evidence, not as headings to write under. For each of the ten services, give a judgment about whether the jurisdiction performs it for your problem, who performs it and how well, and rest each judgment on something that can be cited or checked, such as a report, a program or a documented capacity. Use one rating scale for all ten and define it. Look for the pattern across the ratings rather than treating each service separately. Apply the framework's equity principle to your findings, for example by examining where cases occur. Then prioritize the gaps, ideally by how much each one blocks the others, and say what filling them would require.

How the MPH 500 Week 4 example is put together

The sample names the 2020 framework and defines performed, partly performed and not performed. A ten-row table rates each service with a performer and evidence, from case surveillance without an inventory to no workforce trained in building water. The pattern section notes that services responding to cases are performed while services preventing them are not. Sections examine assessment without an inventory, investigation that cannot finish because only 14 of about 35 towers were found, and policy and law that do not exist. The equity section shows 17 of 31 cases in three tracts with 14% of the population. Four gaps are ranked: legal authority, registry, workforce and evaluation, followed by what an ordinance, fee and training would require.

Reading the MPH 500 Week 4 grading rubric

The predictable loss is the framework used as headings: each service given a paragraph of what it means in general, with nothing said about the jurisdiction. It reproduces the reading and assesses nothing. The second is a judgment with no evidence, where services are rated on impression and a reader cannot tell what any rating rests on. Marks are also lost for scales applied inconsistently, for gaps listed without priority and for ignoring the equity principle the 2020 framework puts at its center. Analyses score well when every rating has a performer and evidence, the pattern across services is interpreted, equity is examined with data and gaps are ranked with what filling them requires.

Common MPH 500 Week 4 mistakes, and how to avoid them

Applying a ten-part framework with evidence for each part takes more research than describing it, but it is what the assignment rewards. Share your jurisdiction, the problem and what you can find about who does what, and the analysis can rate each service on one scale with evidence, interpret the overall pattern, look at who bears the gaps and rank them by what each blocks. Defining your rating scale before you start keeps the judgments consistent. The jurisdiction and the evidence are yours. Ranking the gaps by what each one blocks turns the analysis into an order of work for the agency.

Get a MPH-500 Week 4 example written to your instructions

Send the Week 4 instructions with the framework edition your section teaches and the jurisdiction you are assessing, and a custom example is written to that structure and returned inside 24 to 48 hours. The first one is free. Which gaps you call most consequential stays your judgment.

More MPH 500 papers and MPH samples

MPH 500 Week 4 questions, answered

What if I cannot find evidence for a service?

Record that, and say what you looked at. The absence of any public evidence that a jurisdiction performs a service is itself informative, particularly for the services that tend to go unowned. Marking it as undetermined with a note on where you searched is more honest and usually scores better than a rating you cannot support.

Does it matter who performs the service?

For coverage, no; for resilience, yes. A service delivered by a hospital system or a university is still delivered, so it should not be marked absent. It is worth noting where the arrangement is informal or depends on one organization's goodwill, since that is a different kind of coverage from a statutory responsibility somebody is funded to discharge.

Which services are usually weakest?

In most jurisdictions the ones nobody is specifically funded for, which tend to be policy development, workforce assurance and evaluation. Assessment and communication are usually visible because they are staffed. Knowing that pattern is useful, but the assignment still requires you to evidence it here rather than assume it, since jurisdictions genuinely differ.

Where can I find a free MPH 500 Week 4 sample paper?

The full essential services analysis for Legionnaires' disease from building water in one county is shown on this page.

Which gap does the MPH 500 Week 4 sample rank first?

Legal authority, because without an ordinance no registry, inspection or enforcement of cooling tower maintenance can happen.