The Board of Health met 05/10/2023. One of the information items they received was information regarding the Tri-County Public Health Alignment Charter.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for your downloading pleasure.
Per Health Officer Charles Sepers, the charter is essentially a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding that the five local health jurisdictions in the Tri-County area have worked on over the last 3-4 months. It looks like they signed it at the end of March and the beginning of April.
Those five jurisdictions are Outagamie County, Winnebago County, Calumet County, the City of Appleton, and the City of Menasha. Those 5 public health jurisdictions include 4 hospital systems, so there are a lot of different entities sometimes doing overlapping things. This Tri-County Public Health Alignment Charter is essentially an attempt to provide a framework for how the public health jurisdictions will organize and conduct themselves in a more unified manner.
Mayor Woodford pointed out that the City of Appleton is in three counties. So Appleton has a Health Department as do each of the three counties. Each health department has an obligation to conduct similar health planning exercises. Additionally, when someone in Appleton needs to be contacted, they will be contacted by someone from the Appleton Health Department as well as someone in the health department for the county in which they live. Those health department representatives will be asking similar questions and probing into the same areas of a person’s life which can be taxing for the individual being contacted.
Health Officer Sepers said they were still in the early stages of figuring out this structure. They hoped to come up with a way to share staff and not duplicate their work across health departments. They were also exploring what sort of improvements they could make as well as what sort of funding streams might be available to them.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1092161&GUID=F715722F-3DFC-4231-8AA1-235A8C4FDC0E
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