Good morning. We’ve lost another important health resource here in Sullivan County, but none of you would know it unless you could decipher the report of the Director of Public Health last week. I’m talking about Maternal Child Health Nursing, which ended when our one remaining Maternal Child Health Specialist nurse was reassigned to “restructure” what was the EPI department. For over 50 years, Public Health provided nursing visits to residents with high-risk pregnancies and then visited the newborn and mom. Costs were not always covered by insurance, but it was understood that taxpayers were willing to bear a share because the cost of prevention is so much less than the cost of the consequences, without services. A nursing visit makes a big difference in avoiding preterm deliveries and producing healthier newborns and moms. In the last few years, MCH nursing was often lauded as an important part of the drug task force. Still, after 50 years, our latest wrecking ball of a Public Health Director has just restructured Maternal Child Health Nursing into nothingness. It’s a lot different from what she said that she wanted to do when she was hired.
I’m told that 20 employees have left Public Health so far just this year. Some of them were people who were irreplaceable; Jenna Knox, for one, who worked in EPI for over 10 years, and who is one of the nicest, most capable people I’ve ever known, and the Deputy Director, Jill Hubert-Simon, who had transformed Public Health’s health education, suddenly gone. Every person who left is a loss and a failure of management to give them the support they needed, always at a high cost to the taxpayer.
Then, there’s the PHS resolution last week at Human Resources, tabled, to abolish 19 vacant positions and provide a few of her staff with promotions. It demonstrates that the Director has no intention of building back a workforce. There are now 2 health educators instead of 4, half of the Healthy Families program is vacant, and there only 9 nurses still work in the CHHA. Two or 3 of those are administration and 3 are per diems. Two are almost ready to retire. The Director of Public Health stated last week that CHHA nurses aren’t even supposed to be in the office anymore, just sitting in their cars going from visit to visit all day to accomplish their productivity quota. That’s everything for her, the money. She sees Public Health as a for profit business, not part of government services. We can’t accept that the CHHA is turning patients away, and that those residents won’t be able to get home care. More of our people will go to nursing homes earlier and die earlier. This is not what the taxpayers want from Public Health. They want a CHHA which has the capacity to service every resident in need, as they’ve had in the past.
The Director stated in front of the Health and Human Services Committee that everything has been done wrong in EPI for decades and she’s going to fix it and meanwhile has reported her predecessors to the Department of Health. That is a vile insult to all the people who labored with passion and integrity to build our public health department before she came to tear it down. I have never seen a Department Head behave with so little reticence or display open hostility for her own staff and predecessors before the legislature.