The Essentials for Healthy Homes Practitioners course brings together a diverse mix of housing and health professionals to promote practical and cost-effective methods for making homes healthier. A major strength of the course is the peer-to-peer learning that occurs between students. Through exercises, demonstrations and discussions, students better understand the roles, perceptions and challenges that their counterparts face. And they identify ways to coordinate their work to better protect residents from environmental and safety hazards in the home.
Lead risk assessors visit homes to identify lead hazards and make recommendations to eliminate the lead hazards and their causes. Often the causes of lead hazards contribute to other environmental hazards where the solution may benefit the client in multiple ways.
Lead risk assessors will benefit from the course because it will help them:
- Better recognize the connection between the causes of lead hazards and the causes of other environmental hazards so the lead risk assessor can make more effective and sustainable recommendations;
- Identify methods to improve the building structure to reduce the root causes of lead hazards;
- More effectively convince resident and property owner to resolve problems;
- Develop networks with other health and housing professionals who can help identify resources to help solve the problems; and
- Gain insight into the perspectives of nurses, pest management professionals, environmental health specialists, and community-based organizations to help all be more effective.