How Do Health Departments Create Regulations, Policies & Guidance Documents? Overview of Administrative Law: Part 2

Welcome to the second training in our series on administrative law. This free training focuses on best practices for health departments in creating regulations and writing policies and guidance documents. Most important, it identifies steps that health departments can take to protect individual rights and promote health equity when carrying out these regulatory activities.

Building on Part 1 of the series, this training explores how administrative law shapes day-to-day work in state and local health departments. Agencies engage in a broad range of regulatory activities — from making laws to implementing and enforcing them — and many areas of public health practice are, in fact, specialized fields of administrative law. The breadth of these activities makes understanding administrative law essential for all public health practitioners.

This course is designed for individuals who work in or with health departments, and it can benefit you no matter what area of practice or which regulatory activities you engage in.

After completing this training, you will be able to

• Explain what regulations are, when and how health departments create them, and how the process can promote health equity;
• Describe common legal challenges to public health regulations;
• Explain what policies and guidance documents are — and how they differ from regulations; and
• Identify and implement best practices for issuing policies and guidance documents, to ensure that the process is fair, equitable, and accessible to everyone.

The concepts discussed will provide the background for Part 3 of this series, which examines the specifics of implementation and enforcement mechanisms in administrative law.

If you are a TRAIN user, please register through TRAIN. To learn more about earning the Public Health Law Academy Certificate, see the complete training plan.

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