Program metrics supporting a culture of health
In the third Aqua Talk issue of 2018, I wrote about establishing a culture of health across the entire community of people involved with providing safe drinking water to the public, including state and local health departments, public water system owners, operators and utility staff. I detailed some of the plans to develop a culture of health including training about waterborne disease outbreaks, public notice including health effects language and strengthening communications about drinking water and health with our partners. But how do we measure health and drinking water?
The safe drinking water program developed a number of metrics that we plan to regularly report out on to help us understand how we are doing. The program is involved in many different activities and measures a wide variety of items. We categorized our overall program metrics to include different categories for these metrics.
Categories for program metrics
Each category is shown below with an example of one metric under that category.
- Health outcome – Number of waterborne disease outbreaks at public water systems.
- Health risk – Number of systems exceeding the action level for lead.
- Workload – Number of violations issued to public water systems.
- Timeliness – Percent of design reviews completed in 45 days or less.
- Value added – Number of grants and loans issued to public water systems.
- Customer satisfaction – Overall customer satisfaction with sanitary survey inspections.
- Resources – Number of program staff.
There are multiple metrics within each category. Many of the metrics have been measured previously for a variety of reasons, but some will require developing new tracking or reporting mechanisms. Many of these metrics have established target goals, while other metrics are tracked strictly for trending purposes. For example, our target goal for the number of waterborne disease outbreaks is zero. Our goal for design reviews completed in less than 45 days is currently 60%.
Constructing all this will take some time and effort, but we are aiming to make progress in this year. Once we have finalized the metrics and reporting structure, we will report out to you on our progress. We will report periodically on selected metrics and annually on all of them. We hope that measuring our collective performance in providing safe drinking water to the public and reporting out on that performance, will help us establish a culture of health among all of us involved in making sure that drinking water is always safe.
➽ Ron Falco, safe drinking water program manager
