A Town Hall meeting is an informal event that is open to the members of a community, usually designed to address a topic of concern. The public has the opportunity to ask questions and the community leadership can get a better understanding of what concerns are most important to the community.
Assigned Team and Scenario: Fracking Fallout
Fracking Fallout: A gas-rich mountain community is being courted by industry to allow hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. The governor/local leader is under political pressure to lift a previous state-mandated moratorium on such drilling due to the poor economic condition of the state, but residents are extremely concerned about the potential for groundwater and other environmental contamination and threats to human health. There have even been rumors of earthquakes caused by the fracking. Your team will need to define and characterize the risks from fracking to this community.
Part 1: Create Your Presentation
Develop your presentation as if you were presenting it in a Town Hall Meeting for the public at a local community center. In this Town Hall Meeting, you are involved on both sides of an environmental health issue. Assume you are part of a team of public health specialists employed at a state health department or ministry of health. In this role, you are responsible for assessing the scenario above for the associated health risk to the population, and for conveying that information to members of a community who are concerned about this environmental health issue.
The guiding questions you need to address in this presentation are related to the core functions of public health and the 10 Essential Public Health Services (see the underlined key words in the Assignment instructions, which relate to these services). You should rely on the resources for this course as well as the background gained from your prior public health coursework to develop your narrated slide presentation. You may wish to review prior policy, epidemiology, program evaluation, or other relevant coursework. Create a slide presentation and slide transcript.
The presentation must be 3–5 slides, not including references. The narration should take about one minute per slide, on average. To effectively educate your target audience (members of a concerned community), your presentation must include the following: