Health Department looking for public input at Wednesday session
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on April 20, 2010 1:46 PM
Wayne County Health Director James Roosen wants to put the public back in public health.
One way to do that is to take the Board of Health meeting to the community.
Typically, the board meets on the third Wednesday of the month, at noon. To make it more accessible, this month's meeting will be held in the evening.
The Wednesday session will take place at 7 p.m. at the Wayne County Public Library on Ash Street.
In addition to conducting its regular business, the board will host a forum designed to elicit input from the community.
"The goal is to involve a lot of the public that may be interested in health concerns, interest in what public health does and what the Health Department does," Roosen explained. "I think the more the public is involved, the better."
The agenda focuses on four topics, comparing the local Health Department with the state -- early child health care, sexually transmitted diseases, minority health and teen pregnancies.
"We'll discuss prenatal care that we do, early child health information, sharing a lot of statistics with things like STDs -- we have got a syphilis epidemic going on, of all things," he said. "We recently received a grant for HIV/AIDs case management, so what that means is people that are positive with HIV hopefully will have better access to care, better access to medicine they need.
"We're going to talk about minority health issues -- how do minority health statistics compare with other races? What are we going to do with that?"
Teen pregnancy also remains a hot topic, Roosen said, both in terms of medical aspects and the economic impact it has on a community.
The health director said it's worthwhile to discuss better access to care as well as birth control and the value of making sure that young people who are sexually active are given resources and options.
The format of the evening session will mainly be in the form of providing information, Roosen said, but will also incorporate a question-and-answer session.
"What we want to do here is get (the public's) opinions, which will help us in terms of shaping our services and the way we do business," he said. "We want to share this health information with the public and of course get their feedback. Some of the thoughts are, what's important and what should be available, how well is the Health Department operating?"