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

This collection of tools supports anyone interested in teaching public health practitioners about administrative law and its effects on public health. These tools are part of the Public Health Law Academy, which provides a deeper understanding of the use of law and policy to improve population health outcomes.

Start with our Part 2 of our training on administrative law: How Do Health Departments Create Regulations, Policies & Guidance Documents? Then download and tailor the following resources for your specific audience:

• Facilitator's Checklist
• Facilitator's Guide, which provides instructions on how to customize this training for your audience
• Facilitator's Script, which can be modified for your audience and speakers
• Slide Presentation, which can be adapted to your unique training content

About This Training

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.

Learning Objectives

Instructors can tailor these training materials to achieve the following learning objectives:

• 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.