Tasks 10 & 11 - Rank and Prioritize IssuesThe final process of issue identification was to narrow the focus of EHAT to a singular priority environmental health issue to further focus community resources. In PACE-EH this process is accomplished by ranking and prioritizing the remaining environmental health issues. The difference between Task 10 Ranking and Task 11 Prioritizing is that ranking determines the most important issue and prioritizing determines which issue to address first. EHAT chose to develop a process of both ranking and prioritizing the issues using a singular methodology. The four steps of this process included: Through an iterative process EHAT identified twenty-two ranking and prioritizing criteria which could be used to evaluate the local significance of the environmental health issue based upon a number of contributing factors including local data including morbidity and mortality, the ability of the issue to be addressed by alternative public or private resources, the level of political support for an intervention and the likelihood that community involvement would illicit change in the risk factor or affected population. Underlying the selection of the criteria was an understanding that the outcome of the process should be the selection of an issue that has local relevance in terms of environmental risk or exposure and can be acted upon by a citizen-based group to reduce that risk or exposure. The criteria were included in a scorecard developed by EHAT which would be used to rank and prioritize the issues. The scorecard also included a weighting option where assessment team members could weigh a score by the severity of that particular response. For each criteria EHAT members were provided an opportunity to apply additional weight to that particular issue if the association between the ranking factor was strong or weak. Following the application of the criteria and a weighted vote, illegal dumping and littering ranked as the highest priority issue while walkability ranked second.
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