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CDPH Core Activities and Essential Public Health Services

Our Core Activities

CDPH achieves its mission through the following core activities:

  • Promoting healthy lifestyles for individuals and families in their communities and workplaces.
  • Preventing disease, disability, and premature death and reducing or eliminating health disparities.
  • Protecting the public from unhealthy and unsafe environments.
  • Providing or ensuring access to quality, population-based health services.
  • Preparing for and responding to public health emergencies.
  • Producing and disseminating data to inform and evaluate public health status, strategies and programs.

Essential Public Health Services

In order to implement our Core Activities, CDPH will effectively deliver these Ten Essential Public Health Services directly and/or through strong and effective partnerships:

  1. Monitoring health status to identify community health problems including health disparities.
  2. Detecting and investigating health problems and health hazards in the community.
  3. Informing, educating, and empowering people and organizations to adopt healthy behaviors to enhance health status.
  4. Partnering with communities and organizations to identify and solve health problems and to respond to public health emergencies.
  5. Developing and implementing public health interventions and best practices that support individual and community health efforts and increase healthy outcomes. 
  6. Enforcing laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety.
  7. Linking people to needed personal health services and ensuring the provision of population-based health services.
  8. Assuring a competent public health workforce and effective public health leadership.
  9. Evaluating effectiveness, accessibility, and quality of public health services, strategies, and programs.
  10. Researching for insights and innovative solutions to public health problems.

Strategic Partnerships

CDPH performs the Core Activities and Essential Public Health Services through strategic public, private, and community-based partnerships at the local, state, national, and international levels.