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Oklahoma's Healthy Homes for Healthy Families (OHHHF)
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched its Healthy Homes Initiative in order to address diseases, injuries and unhealthy conditions related to substandard housing. This included unintentional injuries, childhood lead poisoning, respiratory problems (asthma), pest infestations, and poor indoor air quality (mold, allergens, carbon monoxide poisoning, secondhand smoke, radon poisoning, etc).
For over a year now, federal agencies including the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) have turned their attention to the Healthy Homes Initiative and have started their collaboration with the HUD. In September 2008, the HUD, CDC, EPA, and USDA co-sponsored the first National Healthy Homes conference, “Building A Framework For Healthy Housing” in Baltimore, MD. The event brought together over 200 experts with a wide range of experience relevant to health and housing to discuss regulatory, policy, research, and outreach needs to ensure safe, healthy and efficient housing.
In response to that shift in focus, the Oklahoma Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (OCLPPP), has begun to identify the appropriate experts in our state and to further develop the capacity to meet this challenge. In partnership with the National Center for Healthy Housing (NCHH), East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma and the American Lung Association of the Central States, the Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) has offered the course entitled, Essentials for Healthy Homes Practitioners in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Miami and Norman. So far during this two-day course more than approximately 200 participants, many of whom were professionals that routinely visit clients in their homes, learned what conditions must be present to make a home healthy and how to recognize visible environmental safety hazards.
On November 18th 2008, the OSDH offered the next healthy homes course, Launching a Healthy Homes Initiative in Oklahoma City. Tom Neltner, the Director of the National Center for Healthy Housing’s Training Center facilitated this one-day course, which was targeted towards health and housing leaders and decision makers seeking to establish healthy homes programs and activities in their communities.
The Essentials for Healthy Homes Practitioners course, along with the Launching a Healthy Homes Initiative course signals the beginning of an important time in Oklahoma as we expand our capacity beyond the identification of a single hazard and begin to focus on multiple housing hazards and unsafe living conditions which affect the health and safety of Oklahomans.
During spring 2009, the OCLPPP submitted the first ever Healthy Homes request for funding proposal to the CDC. In 2009, CDC selected OCLPPP as one of the six sites in the nation for its two-year healthy homes pilot project, “Building Strategic Alliances for Healthy Housing Pilot”. Oklahoma’s project, “Tulsa Safe and Healthy Housing Project” is currently administered in Tulsa, Oklahoma in collaboration with Children First (C1) – Oklahoma’s Nurse Family Partnership program.
The C1 program is based on the Nurse Family Partnership initiative and is an evidence based community health and home visitation program delivered by registered nurses to low income, first-time mothers and their families during pregnancy, and up to two years after the child is born. Research has identified that certain groups with very limited resources such as low-income individuals, children, elderly, and minorities are often found to be disproportionately susceptible to the health impacts of housing-related hazards. Low-income, young first-time mothers are also a highly vulnerable population who are known to have poor birth outcomes due to a combination of multiple factors including age, race, ethnicity, high-risk behaviors, socioeconomic status, lack of health insurance and environmental exposures. The impact of substandard and inadequate housing and living conditions on this population which is already at high risk for adverse health outcomes can be significant. The C1 program is a multi-dimensional, holistic program, which focuses on various aspects of the family’s health and safety. A healthy homes program also takes a holistic approach to address a broad range of housing deficiencies that affect both health and safety. Such a partnership can undoubtedly yield quantifiable health, social, and economic benefits to these families as well as to their communities.
The OCLPPP intends to submits more funding proposals in future to the CDC and HUD to build a statewide framework for implementing and sustaining Oklahoma's Healthy Homes for Healthy Families Initiative.
OHHHF Fact Sheets
These fact sheets can be downloaded in PDF format. The PDF file format is viewable with Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not already have the Acrobat Reader, it may be downloaded at no charge from the Adobe web site.
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