The next time you see a public health official, please say thank you. As the pandemic festers on, it has become a lightning rod for political polarization that directly threatens the safety of our communities. When I started to write this article a few weeks ago, I wanted to cover the dangers of treating environmental health like a commodity. That is, we only really worry about EH when it is broken. Think of your water, electricity, or any utility you rely on each day. We don’t really do much to address them until they go out. This type of thinking has led to budget cuts for many environmental health departments and a general lack of funding that hasn’t kept up with the population growth in our country. This is especially true now where resources are being siphoned away from EH into other “more pressing” areas of public health.
However, when I read about a public health official’s frightening encounters in Kent County, a Hedgerow environmental health customer of my software company, I decided to shift my topic today.
If we don’t get ahead of this local health crisis, we’re at risk of losing public health and environmental health professionals, which puts our communities at risk for an even larger health crisis.
Raising awareness is always a good place to start. We need more public and environmental health officials to get their stories out into public view. I know these professionals typically don’t like the limelight but we need to illustrate more of the good, bad, and ugly to sway the court of public opinion in their favor. Public opinion is the underlying currency of government agency funding, which our health officials are in dire need of. While many health related nonprofits, associations and political influence groups have been hard at work on Capitol Hill, more needs to be done locally, where many of these battles are being fought in school board meetings, town halls, and smaller forums.
(Quote Credit WOOD TV8)
Next, we must appropriate some of this funding to improve the training and security for public health officials. The reality is most public health officials aren’t trained to handle aggressive behavior from citizens. First responders such as police, fire and military are trained in crisis and conflict management. They have to be. Where are the funds to provide our health officials similar training? Are there any organizations that are pursuing this on their behalf? I haven’t heard of any, and if you have, please leave a comment or send me a direct message. The truth is most public health officials joined the profession for altruistic reasons. When angry mobs threaten their safety over mask mandates, our officials simply don’t know how to respond.
(Quote Credit WOOD TV8)
Lastly, we can do more within the technology sector for our public health officials. Whether it’s massive public companies with big political capital like Google and Facebook down to private companies that are building software features that allow public and environmental health officials to do their jobs more safely, we must all take a hard look in the mirror. At Hedgerow Software we’ll keep doing our best to build highly specialized software for environmental health professionals, you can count on that.
I’d like to know what you’ll do too. Please leave a comment or send me a direct message with how you can help us remedy this public health crisis for the betterment of our communities.
