Roles
A Public Health Inspector (also known as an Environmental Health Officer) is a public employee who investigates health hazards in a wide variety of locations, and will take action to mitigate or eliminate the hazards. Usually the public perception of a health inspector is someone who examines restaurants and ensures they maintain sanitary standards for food safety set by the regulating authority. However, public health inspectors have much broader job duties, including inspecting swimming pools, substandard housing conditions, public schools, day cares, nursing homes, and personal service establishments such as tattoo parlours. Depending on their jurisdiction, Registered Environmental Health Officers often permit and inspect wells, private water systems, and individual subsurface sewage disposal (septic) systems. Other tasks include: campground inspections, tanning salon inspections, beauty salon inspections, correctional facility inspections and mobile home park inspection. The public health inspector (environmental health officer) also plays a vital role in community projects such as those concerning health promotion, tobacco reduction, healthy built environments/healthy communities, food security, and emergency preparedness.
They may also respond to complaints such as animal bites, garbage complaints, odor complaints, or sewage overflows. Due to their educational background they can provide information and referrals with regards to; lead, radon, mold, and emerging diseases such as West Nile Virus and Avian Flu. The field also overlaps with hazardous materials (Hazmat) and many Hazmat responders are also Licensed Environmental Health Practitioners or Registered Environmental Health Specialists.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Health Officer
Famous quotes containing the word roles:
“A concern with parenting...must direct attention beyond behavior. This is because parenting is not simply a set of behaviors, but participation in an interpersonal, diffuse, affective relationship. Parenting is an eminently psychological role in a way that many other roles and activities are not.”
—Nancy Chodorow (20th century)
“It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I don’t know who could have lived with me. As an architect you’re absolutely devoured. A woman’s cast in a lot of roles and a man isn’t. I couldn’t be an architect and be a wife and mother.”
—Eleanore Kendall Pettersen (b. 1916)
“Modern women are squeezed between the devil and the deep blue sea, and there are no lifeboats out there in the form of public policies designed to help these women combine their roles as mothers and as workers.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)