MORGANTOWN — As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
As a public health leader in a state that perpetually finds itself at the bottom of national health rankings, Monongalia County Health Officer Dr. Brian Huggins said it’s long past time for West Virginia to start investing in prevention.
According to Huggins, the Monongalia County Health Department is ready to lead that charge.
“Almost all the statistics that make us 50th deal with some kind of chronic disease. Yet public health in West Virginia does not focus on chronic disease. We focus on clean water, clean food, communicable disease, immunizations, and these are all very important. That’s kind of the public health 1.0 model,” he said. “But if we’re going to get West Virginia out of 50th, somebody has to be looking at how we are preventing chronic disease.”
Huggins said he’s been meeting with stakeholders across multiple fields – from elected officials to social services, feeding programs, the hospital systems, Monongalia County Schools and others about a collaborative public health promotion effort.
As a Monongalia County Commissioner and Executive Director of Pantry Plus More, Tom Bloom checks a couple of those boxes.
Bloom said he recently spoke with Huggins and MCHD Executive Director Anthony DeFelice about a number of topics, including the in-school pantries, food giveaways and health and wellness programs Pantry Plus More has initiated across the county since 2016.
“We came up with some really neat ideas and programs, working not only with the nonprofits, but in other areas to really promote community health,” Bloom said of the meeting. “If we can start being preventative, it solves these problems down the road.”
Huggins said community health promotion is already part of the mission for health departments according to West Virginia Code Chapter 16. The process, he continued, consists of a community health assessment, a community health improvement plan, an annual report and at least one community initiative annually.
“We are going to go above and beyond that,” he said, explaining the initial framework will include a coalition working under three main categories: Physical health and chronic disease prevention; mental health and substance abuse disorder; and healthy habits and social behaviors.
From there, Huggins said, he can envision “little coalitions and collaborations” forming around critical topics like homelessness, healthy eating and a number of others.
“The reality is that there are enough people out there; different nonprofits, different for-profits, government agencies that are all doing work that if they actually were just able to collaborate together …,” Huggins said. “We are going to be the leader in that. We are going to stand up this program, and one of the ways that we’re going to do that is this collaboration effort.”
The goal is to start getting collaborators on board and a structure in place by July 1.
“Now, how are we going to fund this? Part of that is state money; reallocating some of that money. Part of that is reallocating some of the county money. But we’re also going to be looking at things like the Benedum Foundation. We’re going to be looking at, potentially, [West Virginia] First Foundation. There are multiple methods that we’re going to look at, but we’re also going to try to move some people around and try to make this work to the best of our ability with the budget that we have, because we want this to be sustainable,” Huggins said.
“I really believe West Virginia still has a bright future in public health, and I want to make sure that I say that early on.”
