Budgets are down, but costs are up and needs are growing. What to do?
Various officials recently interviewed by KHI News Service offered some thoughts on mitigating or coping with the problems.
Treating chronic illness
“Public health needs more funding — that goes without saying,” said Eldonna Chestnut, president-elect of the Kansas Public Health Association and Johnson County public health official. “But another thing that we’re saying needs to happen is we need to work with academia and state government to create more data about what a healthy lifestyle means: What you can do to be healthy.
“We know some of the biggest causes of death right now are from chronic illness,” Chestnut said. “If we had research data and support, we could say ‘If you do X, Y and Z you’re going to be healthier,’ so public dollars would be spent in more preventative ways so we would not need to do as much on the acute-care side of things.”
Economic development
“We’re dealing with a two-edged sword,” said Jerry Cullen, superintendent of the Medicine Lodge school district. “We’re doing everything we can to deal with declining enrollment and then the state comes in and really cuts our funding. The problem just gets bigger and bigger problem for us.”
State school funding is pegged to enrollment. The more pupils enrolled, the more money a local school district receives from the state. Many, if not most, of the state’s rural schools districts are seeing declining enrollment as the general population both declines and ages.
“The only thing I know for sure is that the only thing that’s going to turn this around is economic development,” Cullen said. “But I can tell you in no uncertain terms that if we don’t provide a quality education for the children in our community, our chances for economic development will diminish a great deal.”
Better times will come
“I’ll tell you it is not a pleasant scenario by any means,” said Rep. Pat Maloney, D-Kingman. “The only salvation here in Kansas and throughout our nation is that we are all in the same boat. We’re all sharing the same bad scenario. We’re all struggling to come out of it. But we’ve been here before…and we’ll survive. We have to have confidence we’ll see better times.”
Volunteer part-time
In Labette County, local physicians have taken a larger role in immunizations and none of the local school districts have yet lain off school nurses. But there are still plenty of other things that need to be done by the local public health agency, officials said.
“They expect you do a lot more planning and do more stuff — all of which is very time consuming,” said Debbie Baugher, director of the Labette County Health Department. “But you get no extra manpower, not extra funding. So you end up doing more, but with no additional manpower things stack up. Not everything gets done like it used to.
“The county is taking major cuts from the state, plus the state closed the correctional facility here,” Baugher said, “so we’re losing jobs, we’re losing people. Common sense tells you that if the money doesn’t come in to the county, it’s not going to be coming to you at the health department. I’ve had some nurses volunteer to go to part-time status and that’s really helped.”
-Mike Shields and Dave Ranney are staff writers for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. They can be reached at mshields@khi.org or at dranney@khi.org or at 785-233-5443.