Environmental Health Community Ranking

Abstract

The environmental health situation in Thai communities are difference and still have a problem in many areas. Several international studies on environmental health situations at community level use the environmental health indicators and community ranking methods to assess situation and analyze community's capacity in environmental health management. In Thailand, this kind of study and data are limited. Therefore, the aim of this study is to rank the environmental health communities in Thailand. The DPSEEA conceptual framework is used for developing environmental health indicators and focus group discussion with environmental health experts and community representatives. The study design is a cross-sectional study using a questionnaire collecting data based on environmental health indicators developed by consulting environmental health experts with the DPSEEA conceptual framework. This study obtains 2019 situational data from 53 local administrative organizations representative of community sample groups randomly selected to cover rural, urban and large urban communities in Thailand. The data collection was conducted during May-July 2020 and analyzed the results of the environmental health community ranking of Thailand. The results found that environmental health indicators for ranking communities including 3 indicators, consist of socio-economic dimension (4 indicators), environment dimension (39 indicators) and health dimension (12 indicators). For each sub-indexes, there are the socioeconomic dimension’s score between 0.12-1.00 with an average at 0.57, the environment dimension’s score between 0.01-1.00 with an average score at 0.56, the health dimension’s score between 0.63-1.00 with an average score at 0.91. Overall, the total scores of the 3 dimensions are between 0.13-2.84 with an average score at 1.91. Then, the communities in this study are ranked according to the total scores of 3 dimensions and show the scores of communities with capacity in environmental health management ranking by excellence, good, medium, and fair level. The results of community rankings also present on the website http://enh-commumity.com allowing the communities to access this information for future use. In summary, the results of community ranking in Thailand covers socio-economic, environment, and health dimensions. This will be useful for Thai communities to evaluate their own capacity in environmental health management and comparison with other communities, and also to monitor these changes each year. These results are importance to the community development in order to have a healthy environment and healthy community