LIBERTY, NY — In New York State, every county is required to have a department of public health. Many people are unaware of their county’s public health department, only thinking about it when disaster, like an outbreak of disease, strikes. What they don’t know is that the county offers numerous other programs through its department of public health. 

The River Reporter sat down with Sullivan County Director of Public Health Dr. Jessie Moore to talk about public health, the services they provide and the state of health in Sullivan County. Questions and responses have been edited for clarity and length.

What would you say is the state of health care in Sullivan County?

Unfortunately, for many years Sullivan County has ranked poorly when it comes to health outcomes, and I know for many years we had been looking at the county health rankings, and that’s something that isn’t used in the same capacity anymore. So we can’t look at that list out of 62 and say, “OK, this is where Sullivan County currently falls,” because that’s not the best indicator. 

What I will say is I understand why the outcomes have been so poor, and it’s not for lack of trying. I see professionals in this county working so hard day and night, 24/7, and I see community members who want the care and they want to utilize the services too. But what I see is, there’s just not enough. There are just not enough health care providers. There are not enough physicians. There are not enough dentists. There’s not enough mental health-care providers. 

There’s also not enough of them that are open the hours that people need them... and I don’t blame them. They’re trying to make some of those needs be met by having additional hours in the evenings or opening on weekends. We need to be able to access these services in what works for us. If you’re working a nine-to-five and then going on to your second job in the evening, when do you have time? And I completely understand that because I’m the director of public health here, and I’m behind on some of my annual preventive things as well. So I very much understand that it can happen to any of us. 

I don’t know the best fix. It’s for us to continue to offer [services] and to offer them at different times and in different locations, and going out to those more rural areas with more of these mobile units is a fantastic idea. I’m so excited to be collaborating with different groups such as Ellenville Regional and Refuah and Sun River Health, who have these mobile units. But we need to attract more providers to our area. We need to expand the access, the hours, the locations, and meet people where they’re at.

What kinds of services does the Department of Public Health offer?

Each county is expected to have a local health department. Here we are what’s called a partial service location because we have a smaller overall population in this county, so that means we do not have as many services as some larger counties, such as Orange County. But what we do hold are a few of the different programs that the state requires to be provided to everyone. 

That is things like our early intervention. So we cover early intervention and preschool services. So for any kids that may need a little extra help, might be behind, and could benefit from speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy, any of those types of services, that’ll get them closer to being ready for school by the time they hit five. So we’re overseeing all of those, which are state requirements. 

We’re also overseeing communicable diseases, or anything that can spread. We are keeping an eye on all the numbers when it comes to things like measles, whooping cough or anything that could possibly spread to large groups of people. We’re also providing vaccinations. For folks that don’t have insurance or they are underinsured, we’re able to provide many times free vaccinations to those individuals. A lot of times, we’re providing vaccines to kids to make sure that they’re able to go to school so that they’re not excluded. 

We also run our rabies program for the county. So when somebody is exposed, whether it be from a dog bite or maybe a bat, raccoon, we have nurses in that department who will investigate and see what is needed and if that individual may need to be treated, and if that specimen may need to be sent up to the state lab for testing to rule out whether they’ve been exposed to rabies or not.  

We have an education and outreach department. On a lot of these topics, we have a team that goes out into the community and provides education, as well as referrals to come in or to other resources in the community to let people know where they can go to get services. So our health educators are going into schools, they’re going into places of employment, and even more important is they’re going where folks are what we consider more of a high-risk population, whether that be homeless folks, so going into food pantries, soup kitchens, the local motels where Section 8 houses some folks. It’s also looking at individuals who may be substance users, so whether it be drugs and alcohol. So some of those higher-risk groups of folks who may not be accessing health care easily, we’re trying to fill in those gaps and then link them to the services that exist. 

We also hold what is called a certified home health agency here in Sullivan County that we call the CHHA. There are only six counties left in New York out of 62 that have a CHHA program. This is a little bit different because all the other services are just automatically provided to residents. This is one where you would need to qualify, and then it would be paid through either Medicaid, Medicare or your private insurance. This essentially is a home visiting service for homebound folks who require some sort of medical intervention. So we have skilled nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists and home health aides that are going into the homes of those that qualify and our team is able to work with them to get them to a place where they can then continue their care with some sort of outside facilities.