Liene Topko – Central District Health Department (CDHD)

The mission of Central District Health Department (CDHD) is, “To protect and improve the health and well-being of our community.” The health department is located in Grand Island, and serves the counties of Hall, Hamilton, and Merrick counties. The population of the service area is approximately 78,600. The health department includes 27 full-time staff in four units: 1) Administration, 2) Environmental Health, 3) Community Health, and 4) Health Projects.

The health department provides a number of programs and services. Examples include environmental health services. For example, due to a large number of personal wells, the health department’s Environmental Division tests the water quality in these wells. Testing also encompasses public wells as well as those located outside of their district. The division also conducts various facility inspections. Another program area is Emergency Preparedness whose focus is to effectively plan, collaborate, coordinate, and address any emergency that may arise, including extreme weather conditions, an infectious disease outbreak, or other environmental events. The Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) program is another service provided by the health department. CDHD has a full-service Immunization Program and several health educators that work in the community with businesses and the city. Community health workers (CHW) work with community members on various health concerns, such as the Diabetes Prevention Program, provided in Spanish and English, in which nurses and CHWs work with community members who are at risk for diabetes. Overall, they wish to achieve a healthy community by providing the best, needed services possible.

This project will focus on developing a survey, which will be distributed to CDHD community partners to determine their current areas of focus, their performance measures, their priority areas as identified in the Community Health Assessment (CHA), their willingness to work with other partners, and any data or technical assistance needs that could be provided by CDHD. After the survey is completed, it may be necessary to conduct follow up interviews to discuss the responses further. After the implementation of the survey, the data will be analyzed. The responses will be compiled and used to place the organizations into community-facilitated workgroups to develop performance measures, the performance measures will then be analyzed and a gap analysis will be conducted. The other component of this project is to learn how a local health department functions and see public health in action.

Regarding the research, the survey has been sent out to approximately 50 people, however not many responded so individualized e-mails needed to be sent out. Currently 18 responses have been received which the Health Director was happy with, so data analysis has been started. Currently, we are finding that the various partners of CDHD are working on six priority areas that were identified in the CHA, which is great news. We are currently looking at all of the different programs and determining how to organize focus groups to bring partners together to discuss successes.

The other component of this has been learning about the health department and what they do. I’ve talked with the Health Director, Assistant Health Director, Health Educators, Community Health Workers and any others. I’ve also had the opportunity to shadow the health inspectors in restaurant inspections (images below), assisted in putting together a press release about cervical cancer, volunteered at the Nebraska Mission of Mercy (images below), has the opportunity to lead a team-building activity for the whole staff, assessing vending machines for healthy foods (images below) and so much more. It has been an amazing experience thus far.